The aim is to stage artistic environments that provoke University-wide conversation about the persistence of passage, from environments to communities, while emphasizing the challenge of survival in hostile socio-ecological climates.

Duration lies at the core of conceptual, architectural, and media art, whether through the experience of the ephemeral media of installation, performance, screen, sound, and time-based art or through the representation of the passage of time via creation, migration, memory, and motion. The idea of duration thus foregrounds the artistic horizons of both temporality and corporeity, indicating the persistence and continued presence of the material world through which the historical and virtual are experienced in their potentiality.

Duration can be “short” in its transience, ephemerality, volatility, and perishability. And it can be “long” in its durability, endurance, steadfastness, longevity, and survival. Biennial projects ponder institutional and racial violence, the temporality of indigenous culture, the “long durée” of gradual historical alterations, trans gender and sexualities, slowness of painting and reading, contemplations of the built environment, “deep time” of ecology and volatile encroachments of global warming, passage of sound, and historical imperatives of persistence and survival under threatening cultural conditions.