“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?”

— The Mushroom at the End of the World, “Prologue: Autumn Aroma” (2015)1
by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

“We once believed ourselves destined to a vast sidereal ocean, now we find ourselves thrown back at the harbor whence we started...”

— The Ends of the World, “Chapter 1: What Rough Beast” (2016)
by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Offworlds brings together recent and new works by 18 artists that contemplate the possibilities found in detritus, ruin, and an aesthetics of failure, which emerge in the monolithic face of “the end of the world.” In terms of materiality–from dirt, ash, petrified wood, cement, everyday rubble, to dismantled yet functioning machine parts–this exhibition further embraces the quality of being “off,” of being marginal, as well as marked by cyclical decline.

And what is “the end of the world” but a “downward turn of the Western anthropological adventure”? According to decolonial scholars Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, to refuse this one central conception of “the world” as defined by promises of infinite progress and growth, is to allow for the greater coexistence of multiple “planes of immanence traced by the numberless collectives that traverse and animate it.” Here, at “the end,” modernity and colonialism leave trails of decay indeed. Yet as anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes, “we can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes” where possibilities for other visions of the future and worldbuilding may lie in the remnants.

In science fiction, an “offworld” denotes an exoplanet that operates (often for harboring new colonies or the continuous extraction of resources) beyond a main planet (often one that has ecologically collapsed into lifeless ruin). It is an image increasingly familiar in popular media. If from our earthly ruins, the offworld represents the last upward and outward hope for a great cosmic escape, this exhibition also looks downward and inward to the many worlds we already inhabit, which are vitally marginal. For many of us, we have epistemologically inhabited a failing, central world, yet also have traversed between many others, some of which have already come to an end. It is from here that the works in Offworlds depart in multiple, fractured, ruinous directions.