“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.
Artists showing in Zilkha Gallery: Emilio Cruz, Rhea Dillon, Nikita Gale, Jasper Marsalis, Rodney McMillian, Daid Puppypaws, BLACKNASA, and the Otis Space Technology Research Collective, Pope.L, Coumba Samba, Michael E. Smith, SoiL Thornton, Kaari Upson
Additional contributions by: The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, K.O. Asante, Jamil G Baldwin, Luisa Bryan ’19, Ben Chaffee ’00, East Main Fish & Chips, Kyle Dancewicz, Darby English, Erica Enriquez, Aili Francis ’19, Boz Garden, Emelia Gertner ’20, Salim Green ’20, Teo Halm, Kevin Holliday ’19, Brandon LaBelle, Chris Lloyd, Jared Quinton, Steven Shaviro, Shani Strand, Charlotte Strange ’19, Paul Thek, Samantha Topol.
Offsite and online: locallygrown.tv / DFT Radio / The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Publication: DFT 2025 Zine.
Co-curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee and Sullivan Fellow in Art Salim Green. Exhibition Management by Rosemary Lennox, Art Installation by Paul Theriault.
Support for the exhibition and related programming was provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.
Zilkha Gallery is free and open to the public Tuesday through Sunday. The exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 18 through Tuesday, October 21, 2025; and from Tuesday, November 25 through Monday, December 1, 2025.
Located on the campus of Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut, it is situated two hours north of New York.
Events
Lunch and Learn: Bring Your Own Lunch to the Gallery for a curator tour of the exhibition. Student led exhibition tours: Tours run most Saturdays and last approximately 45 minutes.