How might art activate empowering futurities under the troubling weight of climate change, global pandemic, racial trauma, political insecurity, social injustice, challenged women’s and sexual rights, effaced indigenous histories?

Inviting celebratory imaginations and enactments of “Futurities, Uncertain,” the 2022 Cornell Biennial seeks an artistic call and response to counter singular utopic models, colonial visions, and socio-cultural sameness. How might artistic imaginaries stage the potential of multiple futurities, thus rendering uncertain the confidence of the colonial past and the multinational present? Inspired by global artistic response to technological and biopolitical hegemony, artistic futurities imagine cultural transformation in its plenitude. An exchange of artistic projects across the disciplines might animate the future differently: Future Cinema, Future Cities, Afrofuturism, ecological activism, artistic animisms, biological (r)evolution, poetic realism, abstract expression, sound fields, surviving species, feminist utopias, intermedialities, imagined gardens, and sacred spaces.

Projects might ponder future blends of human, animal, and material just as they might reflect on fluid temporal movements between past, present, and future. How, today, might artists respond to the future demands of death, erosion, war, memory, extinction, social oppression, digital obsolescence, and cultural terrorism? How might multiple artistic practices embrace the uncertainty of futurities to activate creativity, thought, and social justice anew?

Photo credit: Mendi + Keith Obadike; Photo by Sean Carroll