Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity

 

CLALS is a co-sponsor of the contemporary art exhibition "Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity" which will open during the Transnational Feminist Networks Symposium on September 12-13th, 2024 at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  

The exhibition opening will run from 4:30-8:30pm on Friday, Septmeber 12 and will include a reception, keynote speaker, and artist talk.

The exhibition will be on display at the Annenberg School for Communication until mid-November 2024.

 

Exhibition Inspiration:

In recent years, popular mobilizations like #MeToo, the traveling protest chant ‘Un violador en tu camino,’ and the International Women’s March have contributed to a global feminist resurgence. These moments of heightened visibility inspire, uplift, and illuminate pressing concerns facing women and gender-diverse individuals around the world but often eclipse the ongoing work at the grassroots level amidst seemingly insurmountable odds. Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity aims to highlight the undercurrents of popular feminisms — the acts, rituals, and practices that sustain transnational feminist solidarities and networks of care.

Beyond a sense of hope for a future we’d like to see from the top-down, our exhibition is inspired by Tina Campt’s proposal for a “grammar of black feminist futurity” that attends to the undercurrents of futurity evident in the present, the everyday, and the quotidian. She describes this revolutionary grammar (in the future real conditional) as a performance of a future that has not yet happened but must. Present Futures invites artists to meditate upon the quieter registers of feminist futurity that we can begin to imagine, live, and embody in the present.

Selected artworks interpret the quotidian practices of the everyday as a means of consistently cultivating radical feminist knowledges, sustaining networks of care, and articulating communal resistance, within and beyond territorial borders, in often unspectacular and unglamorous ways.

  

The exhibit's curatorial team is Cienna Davis, Lucila Rozas Urrunaga, Simron Gill, Valentina Proust, and Azsaneé Truss.

Learn more here.