Trans Ecologies: Ohan Breiding and Jill Casid in Conversation

Ohan Breiding and Jill Casid are in conversation as part of a new speaker series that brings together artists and scholars who are shaping the expansive field of trans ecologies across visual, theoretical, and historical practices. Here, trans does not merely describe a subject position but offers tactics for navigating Anthropocene violence and loss. Critical trans perspectives on ecologies understand sex and gender as constructed by settler colonialism and racial capitalism that depend on models of hetero-reproductive kinship, bounded singular subjects, sharp divisions between nature and culture, and exploitative labor practices. Working from within the devastated sites scaped by these imbricated forces, trans ecologies materialize new embodied knowledges, more-than-human relational networks, and practices of care and justice at the ends of the world.
This series is organized by Lex Lancaster, assistant professor, History and Theory of Art in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Cooper Union.

Registration on Eventbrite is required. However, an Eventbrite ticket does not guarantee entry as this is a first-come-first-served free event.

is a Swiss artist and filmmaker based in New York. Through photography, photographic and filmic archives, video and collaboration they employ a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care by amplifying landscapes as witness. Most recently, their work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, Arts and Letters, Hesse Flatow, Oceanside Museum (Getty PST), FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Kunsthaus Zürich, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Breiding is a 2025–2026 Sharpe-Walentas Artist in Residence and has previously held residencies at the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), Triangle Arts, TBA21–Academy Ocean Space, LMCC on Governors Island, the Millay Colony, and Shandaken: Storm King. Breiding is an assistant professor in the art department at Williams College and is represented by Ochi Gallery, Los Angeles.
An artist-theorist and historian, is professor of visual studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Casid is bringing to completion Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005), Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022), and the co-edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the steirischerherbst ’23 in Graz.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art