The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene chronicles an era of rapid, radical and irrevocable ecological change through works of art by 45 contemporary international artists. We live in a world of imminent extinctions, runaway climate change and the depletion of biodiversity and resources. Our age has been identified as the Anthropocene, a controversial term used to name a new geological epoch defined by human impact. While geological epochs are known as products of slow change, the Anthropocene has been characterized by speed. Rising water, surging population and new technologies that compress our breathless sense of space and time. Philosopher Santiago Zabala, echoing Heidegger, warns, “The greatest emergency is the absence of emergency.”
Despite the challenges of disaster and denial, artists in the exhibition respond with resistance, imagination and new ways of seeing and thinking about the world to come. The artists contest mastery of human power over nature while re-visioning the bond of humans to non-human life. In this way, they sustain an openness, wonder and curiosity, keeping optimism in check and nihilism at bay. Organized around overlapping trajectories, the exhibition is structured as a collage of networked ecologies and stories within stories. They include raw material, disaster, consumption, loss, justice and the emergence of new and nonhierarchical alliances in human-non-human relations.
