T.J. Demos

T.J. Demos is a critic and reader in the Department of Art History, University College London. His current research focuses on contemporary art and visual culture, investigating in particular the diverse ways that artists and activists have negotiated crises associated with globalization, including the emerging conjunction of post-9/11 political sovereignty and statelessness, the hauntings of the colonial past, and the growing biopolitical conflicts around ecology and climate change. Demos has co-curated the exhibitions Uneven Geographies (2010) and the upcoming Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas (2015), both at Nottingham Contemporary.

He writes widely on modern and contemporary art and politics under globalization, and is the author, most recently, of The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (2013), and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013). He also recently guest edited “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology,” a special issue of the journal Third Text (no. 120, 2013). Demos is Director of the forthcoming Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz.