Great Texts/Big Questions' lecture by T.J. Demos on Thursday 11th September 2025

The lecture, titled The Tears of Justice: Contemporary Art and Environmental Violence explores how contemporary artistic practices interrogate and reimagine the meaning of justice, treating it not as a fixed legal or political principle but as a speculative, affective, and aesthetic terrain. Beginning with Claudia Rankine’s assertion that “there is no justice... there’s ‘just us’,” the analysis considers how art grapples with the gap between abstract ideals and lived realities. Through three case studies — US artist jackie sumell’s Solitary Garden, UK-based Forensic Architecture’s Environmental Racism in Death Alley, and Palestinian artist Vivien Sansour’s Heirloom Seed Library and Traveling Kitchen — the talk, based on a current book in progress, examines how social, environmental, and climate justice are embodied, enacted, and imagined through creative forms. These works generate spaces for speculative reflection, historical reckoning, and collective resistance, offering not solutions but felt, situated, and often fragile practices of solidarity and survival in circumstances of late racial fascism and settler colonial genocide/ecocide. In doing so, they invite a rethinking of justice as an ongoing process rooted in memory, embodiment, and the refusal to disappear.

Dr Ala Alhourani, lecturer at UCT's Department for the Study of Religions will provide responding remarks.

T.J. Demos is is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History, Department of History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos’s award-winning writing spans the intersecting fields of art history, contemporary art, visual culture and ecology, as well as global and environmental politics.

Demos is the author of, inter alia, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg, 2023); Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg, 2017). Demos co-edited The Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (Routledge, 2021); was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020); and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project ‘Beyond the End of the World’ (2019-2021). He is Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence programme at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon. In 2014, Demos was awarded the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association.

Dr Ala Alhourani is a senior lecturer in the Department for Study of Religions.  His PhD research is on the aesthetics of Islam and Muslim performances of citizenship, conviviality, and differences in South Africa’s post-apartheid secular state. His post-doctorate research explores the aesthetic of religion and everyday ethics in public life.  His research foregrounds aesthetic experiences of religion as embodied ethics, knowledge, power, and traditions.  His research interests are Islam in Africa, Sufism, anthropology of religion, Islamic Studies, secularisation, art and aesthetics. He is a writer and a filmmaker.