The Travelling Exhibition of the Next World

Passage III: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. 2009 (Photo: Eli Elinoff, 2016)

We would like to invite you to help us curate an exhibition of the Next World.

The contemporary world is marked by the relentless churn of transformation: Planetary ecological collapse; pandemic arrhythmias; emerging authoritarianisms; persistent coloniality; systemic forms of white supremacy; digital alter/afterlives, amassing techno-materialities; crumbling infrastructures; and the swirling onslaught of commodities. This swirling context asks us to pause, to sift through the wreckage of the present as a mediation on the near-future.

The Travelling Exhibition of the Next World is calling for curatorial nodes to join us in an experiment in thinking the near-future through a year-long, spatially dispersed “conference in a box.”  Funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, The Travelling Exhibition of the Next World will be composed of ‘curatorial nodes’—self-organised, thematically unified collectives—that will develop their own take on the conference’s theme about the near-future by curating a box of shippable items alongside a series of written papers of no longer than 2000 words. Once organized, the boxes will be packed and shipped across our network. Arriving at each node, the boxes will be unpacked, examined and the papers will be read and discussed. Following each event, a record, response, or set of engagements will be produced and uploaded to the exhibition’s website.

Interested nodes should contact us at nextworld@vuw.ac.nz with a brief theme statement (approx. 350 words) describing how the curatorial node proposes to organize its contribution and a list of collaborators and affiliations. For further information, see our extended abstract.