AoR
Symposium Speakers
MoMA
New York (and Zoom livestream) October 24th 2025
Through presentations and performances—with each one refracting differently its own relation to the sculptural works and practices of Ronald Lockett and Robert Farber—the Aesthetics of Ruination collective explored how feeling backwards and waywards can envision alternative, more livable futures.
Speakers by order of appearance
Annette-Carina van der Zaag
Scholar/artist at the Sandberg Institute, Rietveld Academy Amsterdam. She explores themes and practices of sexuality, critical negativity and fugitivity through writing and wearable sculpture.
Rory Crath
Interdisciplinary researcher and associate professor (Smith College) exploring such themes as risk governance, the material-aesthetics of biopolitics and its discontents, and queer embodiments.
Corentin JPM LEVEN
Franco-Norwegian performer and stage designer. His artistic practice revolves around HIV and the study of the memorial in contrast to the monument in the various temporalities of the AIDS crisis and its ongoing challenges.
Eva Hayward
Teacher/scholar at the University of New Mexico. As a theorist and artist her scholarship focuses on science studies and visual culture with an emphasis on psychoanalytic semiotics.
Julie Tolentino
She/they creates objects, sound, and durational performances, is faculty and Program Co-Director at CalArts, TDR Provocations editor, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and in 2026, a returning MacDowell Fellow and Queer|Art Mentor.
Marquis Bey
They are a professor and writer at Northwestern University who thinks through questions of abolition, trans and nonbinary genders, and fugitive practices.
Joseph M. Pierce
Author of Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press) and founding director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is a citizen of Cherokee Nation.
C. (Constantine Jones)
Greek-American thingmaker from Tennessee whose practice is collaborative in nature and rooted at the intersections of HIV/AIDS futurity,
communal mythmaking as cultural archive, and poetry as catalyst for social instigation.
(Drawing by Douglas Rogerson)