October 01, 2025 – October 06, 2025
A Topographical Summit is a gathering of artists, designers, filmmakers, scientists and scholars hosted by the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections and The School for the Arts.
A Topographical Summit brings together an ecology of practices in performance, visual arts, moving images, and natural sciences that are invested in the capacity for social change through artist-led activity. Using topography as an anchoring concept, contributors will engage in discourse that conceives of ecological crisis as a product of the Western colonial modernist project and, therefore, as a condition that must be addressed through worldviews and epistemologies that are antithetical to the project’s manifestations. The contributors’ practices mark distinct turns away from techno-liberalism and individuation, providing examples of how we might lessen our compulsion to act like modern individuals, in favour of an ethics of inter-existence. They engage multiple modalities and speculative fictions in critique of the techno-rational approach to ecological crisis and show how art might provide the affective frameworks for reconfiguring our response to the complex after-effects of the modernist project.
https://kagcag.usask.ca/…/a-topographical-summit.php…
Participants:
Sepideh Behrouzian (IR/CA), Andrew Denton (NZ/CA), Michaela Grill (AT), Office for a Human Theatre (Filippo Andreatta (IT) and Sarah Messerschmidt (DE)), Parsons & Charlesworth (UK/US), Dawit L. Petros (CA), Paul Suchan (CA), and Arielle Walker (NZ), amongst others.
