How We Became Metadata

The global crisis of our time involves a complex of ecological, economic, technological and migratory challenges that no state is able to control. The result is a provincialisation of our democracies with respect to the new planetary powers confronting humanity. It is from this that our increasingly impotent and rabid politics stems.  Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely the decline of the nation-state that is the source of the great nationalist uprising of our time.

We need a new planetary vision that is able to reclaim and liberate our world, starting today and engaging each of us. This is the task of philosophy as much as it is of politics, of theory as it is of activism. Connecting with a new generation taking to the streets across the globe, this book tells the story of the ever-closer union of our world, from the age of empire to the climate crisis, and presents a plea and a roadmap to step beyond the mental and material boundaries of our nations.

Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative and complex personalities of the 1970s’ art world. In Where is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.

Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemerality of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology-fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

This book explores the self in modern and contemporary art. Accompanying an exhibition in four chapters of the ISelf Collection at the Whitechapel Gallery, it looks at the complex ways in which artists are thinking about identity as an individual, in relation to others, to society and the wider world.

A critical exploration of the creative practice, socio-historical context and cultural impact of multifaceted artist Leigh Bowery. Engaging with Bowery’s key looks and live art through a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou navigates costuming as a performative strategy that blurs the boundaries between art and life.

Thought-provoking and enlightening, the study investigates his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire as well as his fascination with extremity, hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language, establishing Bowery as a radical figure in contemporary perfromance and queer visual culture.

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Lucy Sheen on 28th June 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Lucy’s film Abandoned, Adopted Here as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Lucy gave a performative reading of the poem I Know This Face, followed by a panel on the complexities of post-pandemic working in cultural and performative spaces for British East and Southeast Asians. With Jennifer Lim (Chair), Rosa Fong, Lucy Sheen, and Moi Tran.

Abandoned Adopted Here explores the nature of belonging in the British society and the unheard, silenced, and often erased voices of British East and Southeast Asians with mixed heritages and complex identities.

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Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

P.27-35
Nizan Shaked traces the interventions of Sonia Boyce’s work in received categories of artistic practice, considering how these interventions suggest means of classification beyond media, artistic intention and identity.

shado Issue 02: Global Womxnhood

Feature/Poetry by Fatimah Asghar with Art and introduction by Sabba Khan.

A publication with an essay by Stephen Ellcock in which he exemplifies the spiritual and mythological references in Delaine Le Bas’s work and in particular in the installation conceived for the Secession with references from Greek mythology and ancient Egyptian death cults.

Languages: German, English

Can Taiwan performing/performance art be an avant-garde strategy for cultural exchanging with Shanghai e-Art Festival?

-Referring to the changing face of British Live Art.

Research study by Catherine Jiang.

This title offers the gender-bending performances of Dlane Torr, creator of the Man for a Day workshops. This book documents and contextualizes the development of Torr’s internationally celebrated workshops, as well as her own ongoing experiments in performing gender-play in theaters, galleries, and clubs.