Taking Liberties – AIDS and Cultural Politics

This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the normative imagination defined as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of affective capitalism. Porta analyzes gender, fashion, artistic creation, and surveillance from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that now comes not from the state or mass media, but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones, and driven by a juridical compulsion, become the axes of societies of control. In this way, the distinctive pathology of our times gives rise to a globalized game: normopathy for all.

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.

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies “worthy of defending” and those who who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. That those subject to the most violence-the enslaved, the colonized, the oppressed-have been forcibly made defenseless raises, for any movement of liberation, a question: Can violence be used in the interests of self-defense?

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self-defense. With a historical gaze that captures slave revolts, British suffragists’ training in jujitsu, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, queer neighborhood patrols, and Black Lives Matter, Dorlin discovers a “martial ethics of the self”: a practice in which violent self-defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a livable future.

Translated from the French by Kieran Aarons.

Beauty Kit is an on-going project by the Belgian-Chilean artist Isabel Burr Raty, a hands-on research on the human body as a territory for sustainable agriculture. Isabel Burr Raty’s BK Female Farm is a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their bodily juices to produce beauty care products, which are used for treatments in her BK Spa and critically discussed in her BK Focus Group. Through a playful, embodied and participatory art practice, Beauty Kit tackles radical questions on ecology and exploitation, sexuality and agency.

Documentation from an online lecture by Ron Athey on Penetration in Live Art and Video. This lecture formed part of LADA’s 2020 Summer Programme.

Penetration – be it bodily, spiritual or sexual – is a recurring motif in Ron Athey‘s work. In this lecture, which comes as he begins work on a new project, Athey will explore the artistic potential of the contemporary post-porn movement in relation to his practice.

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Sahera Khan on 1st March 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Sahera’s film My Glow as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Sahera engaged in a Q&A with the audience and gave a short BSL lesson.

In My Glow (2023), Aa mature, Deaf, Muslim, British Sign Language (BSL) mother shares her pregnancy journey through the pandemic, and how she coped with limited communication with others such as the health service.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions, visit our vimeo channel

Video documentation of  an online book launch and discussion marking the publication of the 6th issue of NS*, “Final Transmission: Performance Art and AIDS in Los Angeles” on 1st May, 2021.

Featuring editors Brian Getnick and Tanya Rubbak, and contributors Chris Freeman, Alexandra Juhasz, Sheree Rose, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Ruben Esparza and Philip Littell, for a wider discussion about AIDS, performance art and crisis.

NS, the performance art journal of Los Angeles, is a 6 volume archive of performance art production in LA from 2011 to 2016.

View the book Final Transmission: Performance Art and AIDS in Los Angeles in our catalogue here 

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

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.

pg. 59-67

In Acts of Affect, siren eun young jung returns to the disappearing Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatre. In her discussion of the project, Ashley Chang examines how masculinity is produced by women.

Art Review Issue 26  / October 2008

pg. 74-81

Feature on Elmgreen & Dragset : Inconvenient Truths

Article from Consented Issue 9 : Environment