This talk engages with the ethics and politics of curating the group exhibition AFTER LIFE (we survive) at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts during the global COVID-19 pandemic, wildfires consuming the US West Coast, the US presidential election, and race rebellions against the police killings of unarmed Black folks.  AFTER LIFE (we survive) is a one part of a long-term curatorial research project that brings together Asian diasporic, Pacific Islander, and other BIPOC and LGBTQ artists and performers who creatively imagine resistance to militarism, settler colonialism, and ecological collapse in the expanded Pacific Rim. It is a multi-genre visual art and performance exhibition that stages a conversation around the questions: what new strategies are needed to survive after environmental catastrophe and military intervention, by communities facing displacement and dispossession? How can speculation, humor, and fantasy fuel larger movements for transpacific social change—from the Pacific Northwest, to California, to Southeast and East Asia—and in the heartland of the USA? This talk considers the ways that Brown, Black, Indigenous and queer survivance in the face of ecological and social collapse were not only displayed through the artwork’s thematics and contents, but were actively modeled through the process of mounting a public art exhibition amidst the simultaneous crises of 2020.

To check out the online version of the exhibition, which includes a 3D virtual tour and online-exclusive video conversations and artworks, visit: https://ybca.org/event/after-life-we-survive/