Caitlin Berrigan works as a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer to explore poetics and queer science fiction as worldmaking practices through moving images, sculptural instruments, and expanded new media. Her practice enfolds the complexity of interrelations across humans and inhumans within spatial ecologies, technologies, and systems of power. Her early works address viruses and the choreographies of disability, capitalism, and contagion. Her speculative cosmology, Imaginary Explosions, proposes ways of being in relation to geological animacies. The work has been the subject of a book of the same title (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018), solo shows at JOAN Los Angeles (2023) and Art in General (2019) reviewed in Artforum, and a world premiere in the Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition (2020).
Berrigan has presented her work at the Whitney Museum, European Media Arts Festival, Henry Art Gallery, Harvard Carpenter Center, Poetry Project, Anthology Film Archives, La Casa Encendida, Ashkal Alwan, UnionDocs, and Goldsmith’s among other international venues. Her writings are published by e-flux, Georgia, MARCH, Art Papers, Duke University Press, and Broken Dimanche Press. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Creative Capital, the Humboldt Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Skowhegan, the Graham Foundation, and Akademie Schloss Solitude, among others.
Currently a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with the project Cryptocrystalline, Berrigan has held full-time and visiting faculty positions at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Caltech, Bard College Berlin, Harvard, and UMass Boston. She earned a master’s from MIT’s program for Art, Culture, and Technology and a BA from Hampshire College. Berrigan grew up as a settler in Northern California, to whose lands, creatures, and ancestors she owes her earliest education and ways of knowing.
For the past several years, Berrigan has created an expansive cosmology called Imaginary Explosions (2018-2023) that proposes being in
relation to geological animacies and follows an autofictional network of transfeminist scientists who cooperate with the desires of the mineral
earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. Imaginary Explosions has culminated into a rich collection of three episodic films, looping
installation videos, poetic texts, scripts, audio descriptions, archival materials, sculptures, scores, and communication instruments.
Berrigan’s recent writings include: A voice becomes a mirror plane becomes a holohedral wand, a speculative fiction narrating
mineral appetites and shapeshifting in the deep sea, published for Autograph Press with JOAN (2023); “Kinship Is Anarchy” a
narrative reflection for e-flux on the practice of being-with the kinships we do not choose—human and inhuman, living and undead
(2022); “Omissions,” a two-part speculative essay in the journal Georgia on the sensorium of state fictions, settler
colonial property law, and worldbuilding in California (2022);
Atmospheres of the Undead: living with viruses, loneliness, and neoliberalism,” a commission for MARCH International that
narrates the spatial choreographies of contagion and subjectivities of living with viral alterity, and offers an embodied perspective of
disability from within the technocratic apparatuses of the pharmaceutical industry;and an artist’s book Imaginary Explosions
(Broken Dimanche Press, 2018) that takes on the book as a time-based medium with poetic texts and computational volcanic landscapes to delineate geological ruptures and the immense scale and deep time of sexual violence.
Preview selected works (PDF) and CV (PDF) and upcoming projects Xenolith and Cryptocrystalline. Contact hello@caitlinberrigan.com for updates.