Lecture by Jason Waite on Friday, 13. 12., 18.00 at Trade Fair Palace

How can art respond to a disaster that has rendered the environment uninhabitable for humans? The project Don’t Follow the Wind, including 12 new commissions by artists, opened in the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone in 2015 and has since awaited human visitors. Meanwhile, non-human species have moved in, interacting with the abandoned infrastructure. This talk explores how more-than-human entities are repurposing human spaces and how we can conceive interspecies infrastructure for future cohabitation.

Jason Waite is a curator, writer, and cultural worker focused on practices that create agency, particularly in sites of crisis amidst capitalism's debris. He is a part of the Don’t Follow the Wind collective and co-editor of the book Don’t Follow the Wind (2021). His curatorial work has appeared at Casco Art Institute, and he holds a PhD from the University of Oxford. Presently, he is the editor of Art Review Oxford, an affiliated fellow at the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Justus Liebig University, and the Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki.

The lecture is part of the series Art from (another) perspective, co-organized by the National Gallery Prague and the Institute of Ethnology (Czech Academy of Sciences). This interdisciplinary series provides fresh perspectives on critical issues in contemporary art through the lenses of anthropology, geography, and sociology.

Admission: free / Duration: ca 60 minutes / English friendly / Venue: Korzo, Trade Fair Palace

Download pdf here.