Event

A contemporary art exhibition envisioning feminist solidarities across space and time, in everyday life, with an outlook towards “the future we want to see, right now, in the present”

“Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity” will open the two-day Transnational Feminist Networks Symposium from September 12-13, 2024, at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The exhibition will be on display in the Plaza and the Forum of the Annenberg School during the fall semester. The exhibition opens on Thursday, September 12, and closes in November.

Exhibition Inspiration

In recent years, popular mobilizations like #MeToo, the traveling protest chant ‘Un violador en tu camino,’ and the International Women’s March have contributed to a global feminist resurgence. These moments of heightened visibility inspire, uplift, and illuminate pressing concerns facing women and gender-diverse individuals around the world but often eclipse the ongoing work at the grassroots level amidst seemingly insurmountable odds. Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity aims to highlight the undercurrents of popular feminisms — the acts, rituals, and practices that sustain transnational feminist solidarities and networks of care.

Beyond a sense of hope for a future we’d like to see from the top-down, our exhibition is inspired by Tina Campt’s proposal for a “grammar of black feminist futurity” that attends to the undercurrents of futurity evident in the present, the everyday, and the quotidian. She describes this revolutionary grammar (in the future real conditional) as a performance of a future that has not yet happened but must. Present Futures invites artists to meditate upon the quieter registers of feminist futurity that we can begin to imagine, live, and embody in the present.

Selected artworks interpret the quotidian practices of the everyday as a means of consistently cultivating radical feminist knowledges, sustaining networks of care, and articulating communal resistance, within and beyond territorial borders, in often unspectacular and unglamorous ways.

The exhibit's curatorial team is Cienna Davis, Lucila Rozas Urrunaga, Simron Gill, Valentina Proust, and Azsaneé Truss.

"Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity" is sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Communication (C3), the Center for the Advancement of Global Communication (CARGC), and the Center for Digital Culture & Society (CDCS) at the Annenberg School as well as the Wolf Humanities Center, the Center for Latin American and LatinX Studies (CLALS), The Center for Africana Studies, and The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at Penn.