Please join us for BLOOM: Walk-through with Artist Trevor Paglen, followed by a conversation with BAMPFA Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator Apsara DiQuinzio. This event is presented in partnership with Pace Gallery.

Trevor Paglen’s complex and pioneering work examines the systems and technologies that shape society. The works in Bloom recall the vanitas tradition in art, in which symbolic objects such as skulls, flowers, and books remind us of mortality, the fragility of life, and the vanity of worldly pleasures. In contrast to the vanitas paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Paglen plays with these symbolic tropes, bringing them into the present day and addressing new measures of mortality in the digital era, such as Zoom, AI, policing, and even such threats as COVID-19.

Paglen’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award–winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. 

Bloom is on view at Pace Gallery London through November 10.

This is the latest installment of our biweekly online conversation series for Curator’s Circle members, a collection of online events that offer insights from and Q&A’s with our curators. Please join us online at 4 PM every other Thursday for these intimate conversations.

This event is open to Curator’s Circle members at the $1,000 level and above. Space is limited, and reservations will be taken on a first come, first served basis. Registered participants will receive an email with a secure event link on October 27.

Please contact Director of Special Events Masha Berek at mberek@berkeley.edu for more information or to register.