Sarah Kanouse is an interdisciplinary artist and critical writer examining the politics of landscape and space. Migrating between video, photography, and performative forms, her research-based creative projects shift the visual dimension of the landscape to allow hidden stories of environmental and social transformation to emerge.
A habitual collaborator, Sarah Kanouse recently worked with Ryan Griffis and Nicholas Brown, on the the Anthropocene Drift field station for Mississippi: An Anthropocene River, sponsored by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. With Shiloh Krupar, she was one half of the National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service, a ‘wishful’ government agency addressing the cultural and ecological impacts of nuclear militarism, and a core member of Compass, an art collaborative best known for staging a series of performative hearings into the intergenerational and inter-species impacts of industrial agriculture on regional and global eco-social systems. With Nicholas Brown, she explored landscapes of settler commemoration in the Midwest in the photo-text book Re-Collecting Black Hawk (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).
Her creative work has been screened or exhibited at Documenta 13, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Cooper Union, the Clark Art Institute, the Smart Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and in numerous academic institutions as Tufts University, the CUNY Graduate Center, George Mason University, University of California Berkeley, Colorado College, and the University of Wisconsin. She has written extensively about performative and site-based contemporary art practices in the journals Passapartout, Acme, Leonardo, Parallax, and Art Journal, as well the edited volumes Ecologies, Agents, Terrains; Critical Landscapes, Art Against the Law, and Mapping Environmental Issues in the City.
A 2019-2020 Rachel Carson Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Sarah Kanouse holds a permanent position as Associate Professor in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University.