Join us for a Performative lecture at the exhibition What’s in a letter: Queer Temporalities

Location: Dolphin Gallery, St John's College, Oxford OX1 3JP

16:00 - doors open

16:30 - performance by Jen DeNike & Giulia Astesani

17:30 - followed by a reception and open conversation

This event is supported by the Performance Research Hub.

A performative lecture and conversation designed to collaboratively think through an (inherently queer) epistolary form. DeNike and Astesani’s intervention emerges through the use of autobiographical and auto-fictional writing, interweaving lived experiences, critical theory, and historical research, with a particular focus on queer and feminist history. These tactics enable affective readings of the past while fostering less stable, more dynamic approaches to history—translating it into a performative voice and action.

The script for this performative lecture will be shaped by an exchange of letters between DeNike and Astesani. The content of the letters and the performative delivery will engage with notions of polyvocality. An ‘ecstatic’ chorus of voices—both real and imagined—will emerge from this dialogic process.

Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s final chapter in Cruising Utopia, titled 'Take Ecstasy With Me', this project employs ‘ecstasy’ as a metaphor for exploring queer and embodied temporalities. It also serves as an invitation to ‘step out’ of normative time (Muñoz: 2009) and to resist the ongoing conservative backlashes shaping Western politics.

Throughout this live intervention, DeNike and Astesani will ultimately trouble conventional notions of authorship, expand tactics of ‘live address,’ and pose a critical question to themselves and their audience: What if, rather than falling into ecstasy, we choose it—we become it?

Jen DeNike is an artist, director and researcher. Her practice led DPhil research project Weightless Memory utilizes creative filmmaking, performative enactments, and the role of archives as phenomenological forms of feminist queer visual mapping to reframe gendered intersectionality in space exploration, space histories and space research. Her DPhil research at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford is funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP AHRC Studentship and St John’s College Scholarship, under the supervision of Daria Martin and Anthony Gardner. DeNike is Mentor for Fine Art Exeter College 2024-25, Williams - Exeter Tutor in Fine Art 2024-25, and Retained Lecturership Tutor in Fine Art at Exeter College Trinity Term 2025. Refractions a new collaborative lecture performance work has been awarded a Promotion for the Arts Grant 2025, St John’s College.

Jen’s new short film Prelude premiered this spring at The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Doc Fortnight Nonfiction and Media Festival 2025. DeNike has exhibited her work internationally at MoMA PS1, KW Berlin, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Tensta Konsthall, Crystal Bridges Museum, Palais de Tokyo, MOCA Toronto, Site Gallery Sheffield, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 54th Venice Biennale, Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, Zendai Museum of Modern Art Shanghai, and MACRO Rome. Recent art commissions include Creative Scotland and Art Fund in collaboration with 16N St Glasgow.

Giulia Astesani is a writer, artist, and educator. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Glasgow School of Art and lectures on the BA Photography course at the University of Creative Arts, Farnham.

Through an expanded writing practice that includes performance, sound, and printmaking, her work and research employ tactics to enliven and reposition feminist and queer historical evidence in the present, using forms of autobiographical fiction. She closely examines how this evidence might help shape strategies of dissent within contexts for cultural production while proposing creative approaches to disseminating knowledge beyond academia.

Her current PhD research project initiates a collaborative performative practice, forming a ‘critical chorus’ — a temporary and ever-evolving feminist and queer collective body that serves as a pivotal means by which an embodied and affective form of knowledge is articulated and made public.

Her work has been exhibited extensively in the UK and across Europe, including at Emalin (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), Dilston Gallery (London), Nowhere Gallery (Milan), Contact (Manchester), and Miart (Milan). Her writing has been published in multiple contexts at the intersection of literature and contemporary art, including Get Rid of Meaning: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing #2 (London: Sticky Finger Publishing), Tummy Ache Magazine -Vol.2, Queereal Secretions: Artistic Research as Exquisite Practice’ (Glasgow: Article Press, 2023), Passing Notes - Issue 3 (New York: NY Crit Club), Fruit Journal – a queer literary online journal, and Modern Queer Poets (London: Pilot Press). Giulia was shortlisted for the Art Writing Prize 2024 supported by The Emerging Art Foundation.

Caption for event image: Giulia Astesani, Horizon, Pencil on Book Page (Cruising Utopia, José E. Muñoz), 2023.