Please register at https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UD941vSKQaCHEmE8Qya9Ww.

From pandemic gardening to street murals featuring seeds of change amidst revolutionary uprising, the humble seed is seeing a resurgence of popular interest in the United States in 2020. Yet the seed is a millennia-old motif of both survival and colonization, with expanded meanings for the strange new era of the present — a time characterized by cascading climate catastrophes, stark racial and economic inequity, violent ideological polarization, media pollution and xenophobia. Drawing from film, contemporary art, mythology, natural science, popular culture, propaganda, and other sources, this visual lecture will explore some old and new ways in which bio-matter has embodied humans' hopes for survival and fears of contamination, as well as divergent possibilities for radical counter-narratives of hope to emerge from racialized, neoliberal formulations of climate apocalypse.

Presented by UC Berkeley's Department of Art Practice and the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Series.

Connie Zheng is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and filmmaker currently based out of Oakland, California. She is interested in the diverse manifestations of propaganda, the possibilities for expanding the language of climate apocalypse, and the racialization of contamination narratives, as told through visual and text-based forms. She has exhibited or will be exhibiting work at upcoming shows in venues around the United States — including the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) and AIR Gallery (New York) — and the Netherlands, at the IMPAKT 2020 Festival. She has been awarded fellowships from the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, among other organizations, and will be publishing a chapter in the upcoming Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (forthcoming in early 2021). She received an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, BAs in Economics and English from Brown University, and is currently in her first year as a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is the recipient of the 2019-2020 Headlands Graduate Fellowship.

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