Jason Waite - Interspecies Futures, Nuclear Disaster, and Art: Don't Follow the Wind

Series of lectures
Art from (another) perspective co-organized by National Gallery Prague and Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences.  

How can art respond to disaster that has made 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 been waiting to be seen by human visitors since then. In the meantime, there have been a whole host of more-than-human audience, participants, and neighbors that have moved in. This talk looks at how more-than-humans are repurposing human infrastructure and how we can think about interspecies infrastructure for future cohabitation. 

Jason Waite is a curator, writer, and cultural worker focused on forms of practice producing agency. Recently working in sites of crisis amidst the detritus of capitalism, looking for tools and radical imaginaries for different ways of living and working together. He is part of the collective Don't Follow the Wind curating an ongoing project inside the uninhabited Fukushima exclusion zone and co-editor of the book Don't Follow the Wind (2021) published by Sternberg Press. Waite was curator at Casco Art Institute in Utrecht and holds a PhD in Contemporary Art History and Theory from the University of Oxford, an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, London, and was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum ISP, New York. 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.

Lecture will be in English.