05/01/2025
Next week, Dawn Chan will share her research project “Ways of Undoing: Low Carbon Alternatives in an Art World Reliant on Air Travel.”
May 7th, at 4pm in Classroom 102. This event is free and open to the public.
What happens if you refuse to fly for work? For gallerists, curators, and others working in the globalized field of contemporary visual art, air travel and other carbon-intensive infrastructures are a necessity. Underwritten by nations in pursuit of soft power, or by patrons jet-setting their way through a global art-fair circuit, the forms of exchange most prominently driving contemporary art’s circulation have become entirely reliant on jet fuel.
This talk will present a research project springing from a single constraint: What happens when an art critic refuses to fly for art events and press trips? Going beyond a narrow understanding of flight-free alternatives (like Zoom talks), the project proposes serious, whimsical, unsettling, even absurdist alternatives. Could one hire an actor as a doppelganger? Stage a Twitch livestream lecture? Retain an attorney as a mouthpiece for a day? Jointly review a faraway show with a local critic?
Chan will highlight alternate modes of encounter she has proposed to collaborators throughout the 400+ days she has opted not to fly for art. Pondering ways to decentralize the figure of the global art practitioner, the talk will touch on Conceptual art precedents, the limits of “climate art,” and the perceived futility of individual actions.
Bio:
As a cultural critic, Dawn has frequently written for the New York Times. Her writing also appears in ArtReview, The Atlantic, Bookforum, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, and Spike, as well as in publications by the Taipei Biennial, Hyundai’s Artlab, the Okayama Art Summit, and the Sharjah Biennial. A former visiting scholar at the Center for Experimental Humanities at NYU, Dawn has received a Warhol Arts Writers Grant, a Thoma Arts Writing Award, and a Fulbright. Currently a core faculty member at Bard CCS, Dawn has lately come to be most interested in foregrounding her CV’s blank spaces and events that go missed due to their air travel requirements.