Unknown, Screening + Discussion
Event Information
Event description
Description
Kenneth Anger / Jordan Baseman / Derek Jarman / Victoria Sin / Jenna Sutela / Su Hui-Yu
Followed by a discussion with Sonya Dyer & Victoria Sin, chaired by Helena Reckitt - on the use of Sci-Fi and speculative Futures to deconstruct and appropriate new power relationships against the divide in the so-called ‘other’, in terms of gender and race.
Unknown is part of A- - -Z (Anne Duffau) research through the screening of works that explore & defy preconceived/imperialist hi.Stories of identities & bodies. Through the scope of narratives & distinctive genre ranging from art, youtube mash-up to music videos, the aim of this screening is to break boundaries & raise interest in terms of displacement, otherness & post gender.
Extending our ongoing research into the notions of amorphous body through technology and inner space, one important point is to embracing the Uses of the Erotic referred to in Audre Lorde to make the personal Political and the bodily a weapon.
Special Thanks to Danielle Arnaud & Kirsty White for their Support.
Sonya Dyer is an artist, writer and occasional curator from London, and is a Somerset House Studios Resident.
Dyer’s performative, interdisciplinary and research-based practice utilises dialogical platforms, reproductive technologies and moving image, exploring how subjectivities and alliances are formed across cultures and temporalities. She runs the …And Beyond Institute for Future Research, a peripatetic think tank creating possible futures.
Recent projects include Familiar Strangers (The Luminary, St Louis, 2018), The Claudia Jones Space Station (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, 2017) and Into the Future (Primary, Nottingham, 2015), At the Intersections (Nottingham Contemporary, 2015).
Previously Curator, Public Programmes at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Dyer has previously developed projects at galleries and museums including The Tetley (Leeds) and has contributed to numerous publications including Frieze, Contemporary &, a-n online and Petunia.
Hailing Frequencies Open (HFO), her current body of work, intersects Nichelle Nicols’ astronaut recruitment activism, the dubious genesis of ‘HeLa’ cells and the Greek myth of Andromeda – combining social justice with speculation, fantasy with the political.
Dyer is a previous artsadmin Artist Bursary Scheme recipient, and was a 2011-12 Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program Fellow. She is currently co-Artistic Advisor for Syllabus IV
https://sonyadyerprojects.wordpress.com
Victoria Sin (b. 1991, Toronto CA) is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. This includes:
Drag as a practice of purposeful embodiment questioning the reification and ascription of ideal images within technologies of representation and systems of looking,
Science fiction as a practice of rewriting patriarchal and colonial narratives naturalized by scientific and historical discourses on states of sexed, gendered and raced bodies,
Storytelling as a collective practice of centering marginalized experience, creating a multiplicity of social contexts to be immersed in and strive towards.
Drawing from close personal encounters of looking and wanting, their work presents heavily constructed fantasy narratives on the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.
Their long-term project Dream Babes explores science and speculative fiction as a productive strategy of queer resistance, imaging futurity that does not depend on existing historical and social infrastructure. It has included science fiction porn screenings and talks, a three-day programme of performance at Auto Italia South East, a publication, and a regular science fiction reading group for queer people of colour.
http://victoriasin.co.uk
Helena Reckitt is a curator and researcher with extensive international experience in developing curatorial and critical research projects that focus on the overlapping realms of Art, Curating, Feminism and Sexual Politics; Affect & Relationality; and Curatorial Education.
Her research explores the undetonated potential of earlier moments of cultural and political radicalism, particularly those from the feminist and queer past. Having played a key role in defining, and arguing for the importance of, feminist and queer perspectives on art, theory and activism, recently Reckitt has focused on identifying feminisms that are under-represented within the Anglo-American canon. She explores why these feminisms have been elided, and stages research projects that revisit and reignite them through forms of translation, re-enactment, annotation, and collective reading. Drawing on theories of social reproduction and affect, her research examines the sexual politics of artistic and curatorial labour, including the implications of curators and curatorial students being interpellated as feminized. Connecting these research areas are the numerous exhibitions and discursive events that she has initiated that explore art and curating’s generative potential and relational dimensions. Her previous roles include Senior Curator of Programmes, the Power Plant, Toronto (2006 – 2010); Senior Director of Exhibitions and Education, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA (2002 – 2005); Head of Talks/Deputy Director of Talks, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1990 – 1998); and Associate Commissioning Editor, Film and Performance Studies, Routledge, London (1988 – 1990). As an independent curator she has developed projects for Nuit Blanche, City of Toronto; Flux Night, Atlanta; Oakville Galleries, Ontario; Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto; and the ICA, Raven Row, SPACE and The Showroom, London.
https://www.gold.ac.uk/art/research/staff/hr/01/
