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Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics,
Politics, Environments and Epistemologies

Edited by Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin
Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies brings together artists, curators, philosophers, and critics to engage the provocative Anthropocene thesis. With contributions from artists, curators and theorists, we argue that the anthropocene is primarily an aesthetic event, and as such the arts are particularly well suited to making claims on our geologic and environmental present.

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Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is the editor of Art in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2015) with Etienne Turpin. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.
Etienne Turpin is a philosopher studying, designing, curating, and writing about urban systems, knowledge infrastructures, visual and spatial cultures, and colonial-scientific histories. He is a Research Scientist with the MIT Urban Risk Lab, where he coordinates the Humanitarian Infrastructures Group and co-directs PetaBencana.id. Etienne is also the founding director of anexact office in Jakarta, Indonesia, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. He is co-editor of Fantasies of the Library (MIT Press, 2016); (with Heather  Davis): Art in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2015);  and Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation (Universitas Indonesia Press, 2013), and editor of Architecture in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2013).

Learning points

  • How do the authors and the editors of this book conceive of the Anthropocene as an “aesthetic” event and/or experience?
  • In their views, what is “aesthetic” about the Anthropocene?
  • How do their notion of aesthetics – centred on their sensory and perceptive dimensions – may relate to toxicity and suffering in the “nature culture”, the human world, and beyond the humans?
  • What does thinking and feeling through”art” (museums and museums exhibits, painting and drawing, filming and photography, plastic arts, and arquitecture, among others) bring to our understanding of the Anthropocene, petrocapitalism, and its effects on life and earth?

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