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” opens the two-day Transnational Feminist Networks Symposium (September 12-13, 2024, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania).
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.
Selected Artists
Andrea Sifuentes Hernández
Azsaneé Truss
Barbara Schulman
Cienna Davis
Lucila Rozas Urrunaga
Okyoung Noh
Nasheeka Nedsreal
Romina Chuls
Sim Gill
Sonia E. Barrett
Valencia Washington
Wes Viz
Yaré Colán
Zé de Paiva
Zuha Nasim
The exhibit's curatorial team is Cienna Davis, Lucila Rozas Urrunaga, Simron Gill, Valentina Proust, and Azsaneé Truss.
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.
