Ros Gray: Planetarity

MFA FINE ART AND MFA CURATING LECTURES.
TERM ONE, SERIES ONE. Conditions are Now Planetary: The Anthropocene
The expansion of the Biennial circuit, the proliferation of art fairs, and the composition of the leading MFA programmes clearly indicate how contemporary art is now a global phenomenon. Even if contemporary art does not permeate every place on the planet, it’s now widely recognised that it has efficiently contributed to the construction of economic and social globalisation since the mid-1990s.
But even as contemporary art attains this global condition, the very notion of ‘the global’ is itself under pressure. On the one hand, the dream of a ‘flat Earth’ of open and unhindered movement of trade, capital, people, culture and information has run into the obstacles of historical power blocs, regional interests, and the construction of new barriers. On the other hand, responses to climate change and long-term transformations to the planet’s ecology - what is called ‘The Anthropocene’ - require the integration of planetary-scale systems surpassing any historical construction of the totality of the world.
Both from below and from above, then, the global no longer works as a conceptual or practical horizon of systemic integration. The problem elaborated by these talks is the following: if contemporary art is a feature of globalisation, yet globalisation is an increasingly inadequate term and discourse for the current and future conditions of the planet, what is art now in fact doing? How can it meet the new conditions?
26 Oct - Ros Gray (Goldsmiths): Planetarity
‘Planetarity’ is a term first used by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to evoke the planet as that which exceeds human control. ‘The planet is in the species of alterity’, she writes, that ‘we inhabit as if on loan’. Conceived as an alternative to the ‘globe’ of globalization, planetarity involves an act of re-imagining ourselves as planetary creatures rather than global agents. This talk will address the different ways in which planetarity has signified in recent critical theory, and how it may dialogue with a number of works by artists including Angela Ferreira, Filipa Cesar, Kiluanji Kia Henda and Antonio Ole, who question how we understand the Earth as the stage of nation-state geopolitics and as the threatened home of ‘nature’ and biodiversity.
Bio: Ros Gray is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College. Her research interests include cinemas of African liberation struggle and decolonisation; the militant image; Third Cinema; socialist friendship; lusophone postcoloniality; ecologies; planetarity; autism and the moving image. Gray is currently completing The Vanguard of the World: Filmmaking in the Mozambican Revolution, and was co-editor of ‘The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography', a special issue of Third Text (2011). She has published in ARTMargins, The Journal of African Cinemas, The Journal of Visual Culture, and is on the Editorial Board of Third Text.