Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog’s scorched elegy for a burning world, becomes a mirror held up to the present. Filmed above the oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, Herzog’s apocalyptic vision feels less like history than prophecy: a landscape of extraction, ruin, and eerie, almost inhuman beauty that rhymes too easily with today’s geopolitical fires.
From this starting point, Feral Rising assembles a programme that refuses to look away and refuses to stay still. A cross-generational screening responds to Herzog’s darkness and pushes beyond it: into the feral, the fugitive, the uncontainable. Interspaced with some โbreathersโ to alleviate the sometimes heavy subjects with ethereal or humorous nuggets ๐
Something is risingโฆ
The artists in this selection are representative of A- – -Z ways of programming: cross-generational and intersectional, inclusive of POVs from black, brown, and Asian queers to working class artists; all with tremors and rumbles for rebel minds.
A- – -Z programming lies in its repositioning of curating not as a neutral framework but as a radical, embodied, and political act.
A- – -Z draws from and aligns with Curatorial Activism (Maura Reilly), which argues for the urgent need to challenge exclusionary canons in institutional curation. It positions itself as part of a broader activist curatorial movement that seeks to decentralise whiteness, heteronormativity, and object-focused exhibitions in favour of practices that are time-based, collaborative, and politically engaged. Through programming that highlights performance, sound, and process rather than static objects, the project critiques and bypasses traditional exhibition economies and the capitalist underpinnings of the white cube.
A- – -Z projects adopt speculative fiction as a method, inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and the studies from adrienne maree brown, amongst others. The use of the novel as both a conceptual and structural influence, blending alternate histories, reframes how art and knowledge can be disseminated. Like Le Guinโs portrayal of the Kesh people in Always Coming Home for example, the projects envision alternative cultural frameworks beyond capitalist, patriarchal, or colonial logics. But also thinking of strategies of actions inspired by Emergent Strategies that maree brown has developed: the platform becomes a speculative curatorial model rooted in multiplicity and non-linearity.
bringing something to the point of collapse without it falling Jack Halberstam, โAn Aesthetics of Collapseโ (or unworlding), 2021
