Video Pool Media Arts Centre in collaboration with Actual Contemporary presents
The Age of Catastrophe
13 November – 12 December 2015
at Actual Contemporary, 300 Ross Avenue
While catastrophes and their representations in culture and thought are by no means new to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there is an increasing global apprehension that the series of both natural and manufactured cataclysms – ranging from droughts to nuclear meltdowns – is accelerating. This intensification of frequency and devastation demands an artistic and cultural response. What sorts of insight might art produce in the face of the catastrophic event today? The artists involved in the exhibition AGE OF CATASTROPHE address themselves to this question by exploring how we experience catastrophe in our lives or through mediatic technologies: becoming aware both psychologically and collectively that the next catastrophe might be just around the corner, on that might be inexorable and permanent. Inspired by myth, mathematical paradigms, biopolitical contestation and evolutionary models, the artworks in this exhibition pose questions vis-à-vis the sociocultural positions available in the face of past, present, and future catastrophes.
The month-long exhibition is supplemented by an all-day symposium CATASTROPHE, CATACLYSM AND THE SINGULAR ACCIDENT during which leading national and international artists, scholars and cultural critics will discuss the speculative, aesthetic and political possibilities afforded by the phenomena that take unto themselves tsunamis and technological disasters, epidemics and tectonic shifts, eviction and colonialism, radiation and scorched earth.