A Topographical Summit

October 01, 2025 - October 06, 2025

A Topographical Summit (ATS): a gathering of artists, designers, scientists and scholars hosted by the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections.

ATS brings together an ecology of practices in performance, visual arts 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 that provide 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.

Participants:

Sepideh Behrouzian (IR/CA), Michaela Grill (AT) Office for A Human Theatre (Sarah Messerchmidt (DE) and Filippo Andreatta (IT))

Parsons and Charlesworth(UK/US) Dawit Petros (CA) Paul Suchan (CA) plus more to come.

Image credit: Film still from The Great Thaw, Michaela Grill, Karl Lemieux, AT/CAN 2024, 46 min.