Online Talk with Maria Thereza Alves in conjunction with the exhibition "Potential Worlds 1: Planetary Memories"

• Wed, 09/30/2020, 5 p.m.: Maria Thereza Alves in conversation with Heike Munder, director and co-curator of the exhibition, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich

• Register to receive a Zoom link: kunstvermittlung@migrosmuseum.ch
• In English

• A cooperation of the Department of Fine Arts of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

The Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and the Department of Fine Arts of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) have organized a three-day series of conversations that will probe the interactions between humans and nature from theoretical and artistic perspectives. Potential Worlds 1: Planetary Memories is the first of two exhibitions that explore the current state of the relationship between humanity and nature. The works on view in the first chapter draw attention to the ways in which the environment has been appropriated in the pursuit of power and resources. They point up the consequences for the environment as well as the social fabric and question conceptions in the natural sciences that were developed in the course of the power-driven appropriation of nature.

Maria Thereza Alves’s (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1961) career as an artist is inextricably bound up with her work as a political activist—she has been involved in the fight for the rights of indigenous minorities and climate justice; her work seeks to give a voice to those who have been silenced or are generally ignored. In Seeds of Change (currently on view at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst), an ongoing project she initiated in 1999, she studies the dissemination of plants, which parallels the history of human migration. It illustrates how history comes to be inscribed on the landscape and challenges our understanding of categories of the natural sciences.

More talks:

• Tue, 09/29/2020, 5 p.m.: T.J. Demos in conversation with Annemarie Bucher, lecturer (ZHdK), landscape historian, Zurich

• Thu, 10/01/2020, 5 p.m.: Almagul Menlibayeva in conversation with Suad Garayeva-Maleki, former artistic director, YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku, and co-curator of the exhibition