Ways of Undoing with Dawn Chan

What happens if you refuse to fly for work? For gallerists, curators, and others working in the globalized field of contemporary visual art, air travel and other carbon-intensive infrastructures are a necessity. Underwritten by nations in pursuit of soft power, or by patrons jet-setting their way through a global art-fair circuit, the forms of exchange most prominently driving contemporary art’s circulation have become entirely reliant on jet fuel.

On Friday 9/19, writer and cultural critic Dawn Chan will present an on-going research project springing from a single constraint: What happens when an art critic refuses to fly for art events and press trips? Going beyond a narrow understanding of flight-free alternatives (like Zoom talks), the project proposes serious, whimsical, unsettling, even absurdist alternatives. Could one hire an actor as a doppelganger? Stage a Twitch livestream lecture? Retain an attorney as a mouthpiece for a day? Jointly review a faraway show with a local critic?

Chan will highlight alternate modes of encounter she has proposed to collaborators throughout the 500+ days she has opted not to fly for art. Pondering ways to decentralize the figure of the global art practitioner, the talk will touch on Conceptual art precedents, the limits of “climate art,” and the perceived futility of individual actions. This is the second iteration of this presentation which was first shared at CCS Bard in May 2025.

Speaker Bio:

A writer and cultural critic, Dawn Chan has frequently contributed to The New York Times. Her writing also appears in ArtReview, The Atlantic, The New Yorker.com, The Paris Review, and Spike Art Magazine. She formerly wrote for Artforum, where she was an editor in the 2010s. Dawn’s essays have been anthologized in Intersubjectivities (forthcoming, Sternberg Press), Spectral Futures (Bloomsbury), and Science Fiction (MIT Press). A former visiting scholar at the Center for Experimental Humanities at New York University, Dawn is currently a core faculty member at CCS Bard. She has received a Warhol Arts Writers Grant and a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award.

AAAinA’s general programming and operations are funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the Vilcek Foundation, and other foundations and individuals.

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