Cauleen Smith: The Volcano Manifesto

Since her influential 1998 debut feature Drylongso—created while she was still an MFA student at UCLA and recently re-released by the Criterion Collection—internationally acclaimed filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, Riverside, CA) has developed a prolific multidisciplinary practice that expands film into immersive exhibition-making. Informed by the politically engaged experimental cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, by feminist and Afro-Futurist movements, and by jazz, poetry, discourse, and collaboration, Smith combines moving image, sculptural forms, sound, and experimental narrative structures to challenge imperial modes of Western knowledge production. In their place, she proposes new imaginaries and speculative futures grounded in Black culture and Afro-diasporic experience.

At the center of this monographic exhibition at Kestner Gesellschaft—her first comprehensive presentation in Germany—is the film trilogy that gives the show its title, The Volcano Manifesto, comprising My Caldera(2022), Mines to Caves (2023), and The Deep West Assembly (2024). Building out from this core, visitors encounter work from the past two decades, including the large-scale video installation …we are running…(2019), a series of drawings of book covers from her research reading list (2024), newly produced textile banners and flags (2025), the hand-poured topological candle sculptures NONCONFORMITY 1–5 (2024), and her ongoing Ikebana videos (since 2010), all set within site-specific interventions of color, light, and sound. Together, the works unfold complex, non-linear meditations on geological and cinematic time, human responsibility, transformation, and the ways ecological or apocalyptic destruction can generate new forms of possibility.

The exhibition begins with a reading and listening room designed for collective reflection, rest, and exchange. Activated throughout the show’s duration, the space features books, LPs, and custom-made wallpaper derived from Smith’s research on the Pandanus candelabrum, an endangered palm that grows in soil above diamond-bearing kimberlite in parts of tropical Africa. As Smith notes, “I aim to create inviting spaces where people can linger as long as they wish to reflect on the questions raised by the works; for me, contemporary art is an active space that should encourage engagement and conversation as much as possible.”

Cauleen Smith is based in Los Angeles, where she is a professor of fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Her work has been featured in numerous international group exhibitions and biennials. Recent solo exhibitions include Mines to Caves (2023) at the Aspen Art Museum; The Wanda Coleman Songbook(2024) at 52 Walker, New York; The Deep West Assembly (2024) at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo; and the survey exhibition Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town (on view through October 2026). Smith has received grants and awards from Creative Capital, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Herb Alpert Foundation. Her work is held in major collections worldwide.

Curated by Eva Birkenstock.