Abstract
Philosopher Timothy Morton, following Michel Foucault, writes that the ways we think about the world and our position in it are also fundamentally changing with climate change. Even conventional understandings of what it means to be human at all, they say, are being washed away by rising ocean levels like a picture drawn in the sand on a beach.
It is in this context that the increasingly popular artistic strategies that attempt to rethink the conventional notion of the human and turn our attention to other - non-human - or planetary spheres must be understood. This movement can also be observed in the Czech environment, where - from art school classes to large galleries - there is a growing interest in more-than-human themes.
It is as if straw, clay or trees are growing through the whole art world. The aim of the lecture will therefore be to map the so-called "turn to the non-human" in culture and to trace the discursive "roots of the branches" in (Czech) art institutions.
We will introduce some of the global curatorial and theoretical "buzzwords" such as the Anthropocene, posthumanism or speculative realism, and show why they have been affecting both large shows such as documenta or the Venice Biennale and local Czech galleries in recent years.