This video program speculates on Other Destinies of Excess: practices of world-making in the face of dire ecological and existential threats including waste, extinction, toxic drug supply, racism, and colonialism. It includes:

Mika Rottenberg’s Cosmic Generator (2017), which follows the exchange of goods through a subterranean tunnel that connects an overflowing market in Yiwu, China, with a dollar store and a Chinese restaurant in the US–Mexico border towns of Calexico and Mexicali. Featuring seductive textures, hypnotic sounds, and vivid ASMR-inducing colours, the video offers a kaleidoscopic view of the everyday absurdities and extreme conditions caused by globalization, geopolitics, and capitalism.

Tejal Shah’s Landfill Dance (Channel II, Between the Waves, 2012) is staged at a waste dump on the outskirts of a major Indian city, peopled with dancers who move like insects or robots amidst city-like piles of garbage. Employing upcycled costumes and a score evoking the inner ear, it proposes a humorous and somewhat futile view of the relationships that many of us share with other living beings, ecology, and spirituality.

Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s The Infernal Grove (2021) analyzes drug use, addiction, and recovery in dialogue with people who use drugs and harm reductionists. Drawing on the artists’ lived experiences of drug use, involuntary hospitalization, and outpatient rehabilitation, The Infernal Grove speculates on anti-carceral and anti-prohibition approaches to addiction.

Miriam Simun’s Interspecies Robot Sex (2022) is an investigation of life and death; labour and technology; and interspecies sex in an era of late-stage capitalism and ecological crisis. Focusing on various forms of pollination—from industrial-scale manual pollination of pear trees in China, to the engineering of artificial robot bees at Harvard—Interspecies Robot Sex considers extinction and interdependent ecosystems through their effects on the honeybee and pear tree.

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, Jeneen Frei Njootli, and Tania Willard’s Coney Island Baby (2018) follows the artists as they snare rabbits in Secwépemc territory. Centered on this vital skill shared by many Indigenous women, the artists illustrate the entangled economies of subsistence, domestic labour, care, and sexuality evoked by the hare.

Dafna Maimon’s Indigestibles: Heartburn A Do It Yourself Home Video (2019) is a sensorial exploration of the gut, where the body’s inside and outside are intertwined through digestion. Maimon considers the ancient knowledge living in our gut, and its role in affirming our inseparability from our outer environments.

Alberta Whittle’s RESET (2020) includes contributions from ten accomplices (performers, writers, and artists), connecting emergent fears of contagion, moral panic and xenophobia with a call to action to face and heal injustices and cultivate hope in hostile environments.

Patricia Domínguez’s Matrix Vegetal (2021–22) emerges from the artist’s apprenticeship with Amador Aniceto, a healer and curandero living and practicing in Madre de Dios, Peru. Under his guidance, Domínguez learned to connect with the living, multispecies language and knowledge of the vegetal world. In Matrix Vegetal, Domínguez allies with plants through patience and focus, attuning to the more-than-human language of the earth and speculatively accessing the quantum world.

Baum & Leahy’s Sensory Cellumonials (2021) imagines a future transformed by a deeper understanding of cellular biology. It invites audiences to better connect with themselves at a cellular level through “[f]ive ceremonial journeys [that] guide you into your inner cellular sensorium: [from] the domes dotted with taste buds on the tongue, the swaying temples in the ear canals [to] the furry forests in the nose, the sensitive soft valleys in the skin and the layers of crystalline refraction through the eyeballs and beyond.”

Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017. Single-channel video, 26 min, 36 sec. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Tejal Shah, Landfill Dance (Channel II, Between the Waves), 2012. HD video, 5 min, 2 sec. Courtesy the artist and Project 88.

Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, The Infernal Grove, 2022. 38 min. Courtesy the artists.

Miriam Simun, Interspecies Robot Sex, 2022. HD video, 19 min, 40 sec. Courtesy the artist.

Jeneen Frei Njootli, Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, Tania Willard, Coney Island Baby, 2018. HD video, 12 min. Courtesy the artists.

Dafna Maimon, Indigestibles: Heartburn, Instructional Do It at Home Video, 2021. 12 min.

Alberta Whittle, RESET, 2020. Co-produced and co-commissioned by Frieze and Forma for the Frieze Artist Award 2020. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow.

Patricia Domínguez, Matrix Vegetal, 2021–22. 4K video, 21 min, 14 sec. Courtesy the artist.

Baum & Leahy, Sensory Cellumonials, 2021. Courtesy the artists.