unending beginnings: MA Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Practicum Exhibition: USC Roski School of Art and Design
“unending beginnings” reckons with the precarity of our existence, presenting emergent strategies that consider worldmaking and survival on multiple levels, micro and macro, human and nonhuman, to imagine alternative futures. Nonhuman ecologies demonstrate resurgent possibilities, providing blueprints for survival that do not adhere to humankind’s historical narratives of dominance. unending beginnings is an ode to mushrooms, water, trees, cacao beans, jungles, forests, Indigenous resistance, and all other forms of life that do not abide by Western constructs of time. There is no end and there is no beginning, our livelihood is a multispecies entanglement dependent on collaboration and adaptability of all worlds, universes, and microcosms for survival.
unending beginnings aims to dismantle Western notions of progress as linear and individualistic, prompting us to consider the systems we value and whom those systems serve and inevitably harm. The artists included in the exhibition expand notions of community and kinship, embracing mutability and multiplicity over hegemonic systems of colonialism and capitalism that are intrinsically tied to destruction. Together these artists offer tools for envisioning a world organized otherwise, presenting a tentacular field of possibilities and unending beginnings.
unending beginnings is organized by USC Roski School of Art and Design and curated by Emma Christ, Nahui Garcia, Lauren Guilford, Leah Perez, Austen Villacis, and Ruei-Chen Tsai.
Participating artists: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Pia Camil, Gerald Clarke, Jr., Cécile B. Evans, Colleen Hargaden, and Angel Lartigue.
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