Opening Reception: DFT 2025 Exhibition

Wednesday, September 24, 2025 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

Free and open to the public.

“Dark Forest Theory” (DFT) states that civilizations hide in an effort to preserve themselves. If they were to come out of hiding, they’d risk falling into conflict and being destroyed by another civilization. The theory is an offshoot of the Fermi paradox, which points to the distance between our lack of evidence of alien life and the (high) likelihood of its existence. Rather than applying the theory to the extraterrestrial, DFT is used here as speculative social theory, as a vehicle to explore contemporary human interaction.

The group exhibition DFT 2025 incorporates artworks by artists in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, video, installation, performance, and sound. The artworks on view and the exhibition’s curatorial strategies toy with core themes of DFT: concealment, elusiveness, and both accessibility and its opposite. The exhibition includes an expansive list of artists and artworks that map a web of relations that extend offsite. Thus the exhibition itself functions as the temporary nucleus of a network, the nodes of which emit multi-frequency transmissions on a spectrum between legibility, hiding in plain sight, and complete concealment.

The exhibition explores how individuals, particularly Black people, may gain agency through concealment. How might a practice of hiding, abstraction (as a tool and strategy), evasion, a refusal of visibility and insistence on privacy, and opting out, facilitate freedom? The artworks and artists included in the exhibition engage with these questions, at once both accessible and clandestine.

Co-curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee '00 and Sullivan Fellow in Art Salim Green '20.

This exhibition will be on display from Wednesday, September 24 through Sunday, December 7, 2025; and will be closed from Saturday, October 18 through Tuesday, October 21, 2025; and from Tuesday, November 25 through Monday, December 1, 2025.

The opening reception will feature music by student DJs, and light refreshments will be served.