Life After: Visual Cultures Public Programme Summer Term 2025

'Life After' draws our attention to what remains "in the end" itself. Similar to Derrida's decision during the Life-Death seminars to replace the 'and' that generally posits life 'with' death as an arrangement predicated on dialectical opposition, this series rearranges the term 'afterlife' to foreground the existence of beings or things that live on in the wake of social, political and legal discord. Climate crisis, racial injustice, warmongering and state violence all inform a general attitude towards death in which the lives of certain individuals or groups are valued or elevated over others. None of us enter or encounter death in the same way, but many exist in precarious circumstances in which dying prematurely becomes a stark reality. This series focuses on how these lives are narrated and circulate in society and throughout history, in order to reorientate our approach to the life-death dichotomy itself.