Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity

1. Transmitting Tresses
Inspired by the work of collaborator Cienna Davis, this piece explores how Black women’s hair practices build networks and communicate in a shared language of care. 

2. Technologies of Motherhood 
tech·nol·o·gy: the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area OR a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge. 
This piece considers the technical processes, methods, and knowledges applied in motherhood. Though they are often overlooked or ignored as non-scientific, the quotidian tools and techniques used by mothers throughout various geographies and cultures are some of the most life-sustaining technologies humans have developed.

A contemporary art exhibition envisioning feminist solidarities across space and time, in everyday life, with an outlook towards “the future we want to see, right now, in the present.” 

In recent years, popular mobilizations like #MeToo, the traveling protest chant ‘Un violador en tu camino,’ and the International Women’s March have contributed to a global feminist resurgence. These moments of heightened visibility inspire, uplift, and illuminate pressing concerns facing women and gender-diverse individuals around the world but often eclipse the ongoing work at the grassroots level amidst seemingly insurmountable odds. Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity aims to highlight the undercurrents of popular feminisms — the acts, rituals, and practices that sustain transnational feminist solidarities and networks of care.

Beyond a sense of hope for a future we’d like to see from the top-down, our exhibition is inspired by Tina Campt’s proposal for a “grammar of black feminist futurity” that attends to the undercurrents of futurity evident in the present, the everyday, and the quotidian. She describes this revolutionary grammar (in the future real conditional) as a performance of a future that has not yet happened but must. Present Futures invites artists to meditate upon the quieter registers of feminist futurity that we can begin to imagine, live, and embody in the present.

Selected artworks interpret the quotidian practices of the everyday as a means of consistently cultivating radical feminist knowledges, sustaining networks of care, and articulating communal resistance, within and beyond territorial borders, in often unspectacular and unglamorous ways.

The exhibit's curatorial team is Cienna Davis, Lucila Rozas Urrunaga, Simron Gill, Valentina Proust, and Azsaneé Truss.

September 12, 2024 - November 19, 2024 (Annenberg School, UPenn - Philadelphia)