The Unworld to Come. Imagining an Otherwise…
Artists: Marwa Arsanios, Ashley Hunt, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and virgil b/g taylor
Curators: Juli Carson, Annika Haas, and Sasha Ussef
Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) Gallery
On View: January 24-April 4, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 7, 2-5 p.m.
IRVINE, Calif., Jan. 15, 2026 – The University of California, Irvine’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) Gallery is pleased to host The Unworld to Come. Imagining an Otherwise… featuring artists Marwa Arsanios, Ashley Hunt, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and virgil b/g taylor and curated by Juli Carson, Annika Haas and Sasha Ussef.
“If this world is as shitty as we think it is, then why repair it!” demands academic and writer Jack Halberstam, pointing to the layers of brokenness that render life across this planet increasingly precarious — or nearly impossible. In response, The Unworld to Come takes up climate change as a poly-crisis with ideological dimensions, featuring artists who attempt to “imagine an otherwise” within the entangled struggles for climate, economic and social justice, & beyond.
As a guiding principle, the curators have drawn upon Bernard Stiegler’s notion of the neganthropocene — a deconstructed take on what scholars call the Anthropocene, that epoch defined by humans’ effect on the Earth’s ecosystem. From this approach, the question is not only how we arrived here, but how a life worth living might be imagined within it. Central to this query is the recognition that the climate crisis spans a broad terrain: from ecocide masked as “green transition” to the disregard for the dignity of migrants displaced by rising seas and neo-colonial regimes.
And yet, the Californian idea of a ‘whole earth’ remains a powerful tactic for short-circuiting racialized neoliberal capitalism and its extractionist disregard of natural resources and human well-being. With Halberstam, if the curators choose to engage the “gritty, dirty, messy, disorderly unworld to come,” it is therefore not a post-apocalyptic stance. Rather, it is an attempt to perceive the climatic collapse and brokenness as the real (not imagined) condition of our interconnected present, and to further ask how we might live — critically and generatively —within it.
All of this is to say that the question of climate isn’t just one of weather patterns, but a broader one of geopolitical trends that, in turn, produce patterns of forced migration and ultimately detention and deportation. Enter Ashley Hunt, virgil b/g taylor, Marwa Arsanios and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, whose artwork in The Unworld to Come stages an in-situ dialogue that makes unexpected connections between the movements of people and the biosphere. In so doing, a means of living otherwise within the Anthropocene is imagined. It’s an important choice, because as Halberstam puts it, “If you fall and break, you cannot be put back together in the [exact] way you were.”
This exhibition inaugurates the first phase of The Neganthropocene: Empire/Money, Science/Politics, Art/Intervention, a three-part research project by Juli Carson and collaborators under the umbrella of University of California Climate Actions Arts Network (UC CAAN) — a system-wide initiative uniting researchers, scholars, students, and community partners to confront the climate crisis through the transformative power of the arts. UC CAAN is made possible with generous support from the University of California, Office of the President’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) grant program.
Artists
Marwa Arsanios (born 1978, Washington D.C.; lives and works between Beirut and Berlin) is an artist whose practice examines the material, spatial, and political conditions that shape collective life. Working across film, installation, and research-driven collaborations, she investigates questions of land, property, ecology, and feminist resistance, often through specific sites in the Levant and in dialogue with movements reclaiming communal living. Arsanios approaches these struggles through new materialist and historical materialist frameworks, using film as a space for assembling images, histories, and relations. Her work has been shown in Documenta 15 (2022), the 11th Berlin Biennale (2020), the Gwangju Biennial (2018), the Sharjah Biennial (2019, 2017), Kunsthalle Wien (2019), SF MoMA (2019), Beirut Art Center (2017), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016), with recent solo exhibitions at Sandretto Foundation (2025), BAK Utrecht (2024), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023), and the Mosaic Rooms, London (2022). She co-founded several artist-led initiatives, including a recent communal land project in North Lebanon, and holds a PhD from the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian (born Budapest, 1987 or Sachsenheim, 1968 or 1976 or Australia, 1979 or Munich, 1979 or Tehran, 1967 or Iran, 1966 or 1953) is an artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany or Kassel, Germany or Gütersloh, Germany or Santa Monica, California, U.S.A. or the Cotswolds, Great Britain. Sadr Haghighian develops installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions to evoke and resound diasporic infrastructures and conditions of collectivity. Her practice is deeply invested in collaboration, sensual play and listening as modes of unraveling liberal individuality and the sociogenic accords of cognition. Recently, she has been interested in epistemic disobedience as a mode of unlearning coloniality. She co-founded various collectives and coalitions, among them the IIncongruous Tnstitute for incongruous translation together with Ashkan Sepahvand, and kaf together with Shahab Fotouhi and Tirdad Zolghadr.
Ashley Hunt (born 1970 in Los Angeles, CA; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is an artist-writer who co-directs the Photo and Media Program at CalArts. His practice examines the social, political and aesthetic structures through which power is organized, with a sustained focus on the U.S. prison system and the movements that challenge it. Working across documentary, video installation, mapping, photography and collaborative research, Hunt works directly with grassroots organizations such as Critical Resistance, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Underground Scholars, and Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. His long-term projects include Corrections Documentary Project (2001–10), Degrees of Visibility (2010–present) and his film cycle on the ruins of closed prisons: Ashes Ashes (2020), Double Time (2021) and And Water Brings Tomorrow (2025). Hunt’s work has been exhibited at MoMA and P.S.1, Project Row Houses, the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial, Tate Modern, Documenta 12, and community and carceral spaces across the U.S. and beyond. He is a recipient of the 2023 Art for Justice Fund fellowship and the Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.
virgil b/g taylor (born 1993 in New York, NY; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) creates work rooted in speculative approaches to care, crisis, magic and toxicity. They publish fag tips, an online speculative zine, and make work as one half of sssssssssSsss (a study-friendship with Ashkan Sepahvand). Taylor’s multi-modal practice spans installation, graphic-text intervention, study environments, video and public programs, foregrounding histories of exclusion, memorial, and non-normative relationality. Select recent exhibitions include: Louder, Taller, Uglier, Weirder. Learning from Weeds at Kunstraum Krezberg, Berlin (2025); Caught in a Landslide at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2025); Fag Tips for Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst at GAK Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2023); Minor Publics at Artists Space in New York (2022); amongst many others.
About the Curators
Juli Carson is Professor of Art, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Art and Director of the University Art Galleries at UC Irvine. From 2018-19 she was also Philippe Jabre Professor of Art History and Curating at the American University of Beirut. Carson’s books include Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007), The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics (Buenos Aires: Letra Viva Press, 2011), and The Hermeneutic Impulse: Aesthetics of an Untethered Past (Berlin: b_books Press, 2019). Her most recent book is Mary Kelly’s Concentric Pedagogy: Selected Writings (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2024).
Annika Haas is a media studies scholar, art writer, and educator based in Berlin. Her current postdoctoral research project at the University of Hildesheim focuses on artistic practices and forms of critique in response to irreparable cycles of crisis. She is also working on a book about group critique methods emerging in Southern California since the 1970s. Previously, she has worked as an assistant professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). In 2022, she received her Ph.D. in Hélène Cixous's writing through the body from the Berlin University of the Arts. She is the co-editor of multiple academic volumes, including How to Relate: Knowledge, Arts, Practices (2021), and the author of essays on contemporary art, on writing and situated knowledges, and on the relationship between bad feelings and technology (Feeling Bad AFK, 2024). annikahaa-s.com.
Sasha Ussef is Associate Director of the University Art Galleries at UC Irvine. She holds an MPL in urban planning and an M.A. in art and curatorial practices in the public sphere from the University of Southern California. Prior to joining UCI, she held curatorial and programming positions at the Sursock Museum and the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, as well as the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Her recent curatorial projects include Learning from ACT UP: Tactics of Direct Action (2024), co-curated with Juli Carson and The Inoperative Community: Exhibition X Practice, UCI 1965-2025, co-curated with Juli Carson and Kevin Appel.
About the UAG: The University Art Galleries are committed to promoting an intergenerational dialogue between 60s/70s neo-avant-garde art and contemporary visual culture. Accordingly, the curatorial mission is to keep an eye on the modernist past while promoting the most innovative aesthetic and political debates of the postmodern present. From this vantage, the projects commissioned provoke intelligent debate on the subject of art in its most expansive poetic definition. What distinguishes the program is its unwavering commitment to publishing scholarly texts in catalogue/book form in order to disseminate research-based information into the community, providing a venue for the promotion of innovative discourse surrounding mixed media production today. The UAG program provides several exhibition platforms for inter-generational and interdisciplinary dialogue. The Major Works of Art Series commissions original projects by canonical artists working today. The Emerging Artist Series features solo projects by a set of younger artists informed by the legacies showcased in the Major Works series. The Critical Aesthetics Program commissions new work by internationally renowned mid-career artists. Augmenting this intergenerational dialogue, UAG also produces larger thematic group exhibitions alternately showcasing historical and contemporary art and film projects. UAG further promotes an active dialogue between UCI residents and the local and international art communities through colloquia, conferences, visiting artist lectures and theme-based films series, all of which are open to the public. As the galleries continue to mature, they stand committed to being an experimental exhibition space different from the current - but largely traditional - art biennial and film festival platforms. For more on UAG, visit uag.arts.uci.edu.
About the Claire Trevor School of the Arts: The UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts is where scholarly research and creative activity converge. As the only comprehensive arts school in the University of California system, it includes four departments: art, dance, drama and music. The school offers 15 undergraduate and graduate degree programs and two minors that combine rigorous artistic training with a world-class liberal arts education. Named for Academy Award-winning actress Claire Trevor, the school presents more than 200 public performances, exhibitions and lectures each year. Students and faculty engage in studio practice, performance, academic study and interdisciplinary research, often collaborating across campus and within the community. Recognized nationally for its excellence, access and affordability, the school prepares the next generation of creative leaders who shape culture, drive innovation and make a difference in the world. For more information, visit arts.uci.edu.
About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit uci.edu.
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