Alexandra Kokoli

Tracey Emin has undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis from a young, unknown artist into the 'bad girl' of the Young British Art (yBA) movement, challenging the complacency of the art establishment in both her work and her life. Today she is arguably the doyenne of the British art scene and attracts more acclaim than controversy. Her work is known by a wide audience, yet rarely receives the critical attention it deserves.

In Tracey Emin: Art Into Life, writers from a range of art historical, artistic and curatorial perspectives examine how Emin's art, life and celebrity status have become inextricably intertwined. This innovative collection explores Emin's intersectional identity, including her Turkish-Cypriot heritage, ageing and sexuality, reflects on her early years as an artist, and debates issues of autobiography, self-presentation and performativity alongside the multi-media exchanges of her work and the tensions between art and craft. With its discussions of the central themes of Emin's art, attention to key works such as My Bed, and accessible theorization of her creative practice, Tracey Emin: Art into Life will interest a broad readership.

Table of contents
Introduction: The Last Great Adventure is Me
Deborah Cherry, University of the Arts London UK and Alexandra Kokoli, Middlesex University, UK

1. Rethinking Tracey Emin: Life into Art
Mark Durden, University of South Wales, UK

2. 'It was just me, Tracey': Strategies of Self-Presentation in the Art of Tracey Emin
Camilla Jalving, National Gallery of Denmark, Denmark

3. A Black Cat Crossed My Path
Glenn Adamson, Yale Center for British Art, USA

4. Twenty Years in the Making: Tracey Emin's My Bed
Deborah Cherry, University of the Arts London UK

5. The Bonfire of the Fallacies (or is it Phalluses?)
Alexandra Kokoli, Middlesex University, UK

6. Early Emin
John White, independent, UK

7. 'I Do Not Expect to be a Mother': Non-Reproduction and Ageing in the Work of Tracey Emin
Joanne Heath, independent, UK

8. Dream and Diaspora: Tracey Emin's Turkish Cypriot Legacy
Alev Adil, indepedent, UK

9. All at Sea: Bad Girls, Hut Myths and Tracey Emin's 'Property by the Sea'
Gill Perry, Open University, UK

Reviews
“Tracey Emin - artist, public figure, legend - remains divisive. In the first significant new scholarship on Emin in a decade, Tracey Emin: Art Into Life treats readers to a collection of critical essays that probes the reaches of her layered performances of identities. With both her enduring provocations and artistic preoccupations analysed here, this volume offers critical insights into Emin's continuing significance to art today.” – August Davis, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History, University of Texas at Arlington, USA

ISBN: 9781350160606

Publication Date: 2020

Research Interests:
Diasporas, Contemporary Art, Sexuality, Performativity, Celebrity Culture, and 15 moreAutobiography, Women in Art, Feminist Art, Women Artists, Social Class, Feminist Art History, Intersectionality, Tapestry, Motherhood, Anti-feminism, Sexuality and Ageing, Curating contemporary art, Tracey Emin, Gender and Ageing, and Neo-Expressionism

This e-publication includes a collection of revised and expanded papers from the conference Conceptualism: Intersectional Readings, International Framings, Black Artists & Modernism in Europe Since 1968 that took place at the Van Abbemuseum in December 2017. The conference and the accompanying e-publication gathers artists, curators and academics to consider two broad, overarching questions: Firstly, how to rethink conceptualism intersectionally and internationally as a strategy rather than as a movement; and secondly how to situate ‘black artists’ and ‘modernism’ within Europe? The conference and corresponding publication includes key note lectures by Iris Dressler and Valerie Cassel-Oliver. Sections on ‘Intersectional Readings’ and ‘International Framings’ are accompanied by a focus on the work of Nil Yalter, stanley bouwn, David Medalla and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc. The e-pub is free to download and includes recordings of the original presentations.

Editors: Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando
Associate Editor: Janine Armin
Assistant Editor: Evelien Scheltinga

Contributors: Nick Aikens, Juan Albarrán, Lotte Arndt, Eva Bentcheva, Sonia Boyce, Jennifer Burris, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Laura Castagnini, Alice Correia, Sandra Delacourt,David Dibosa, Fabienne Dumont, Iris Dressler, E. C. Feiss, Annie Fletcher, Alexandra Kokoli, Charl Landvreugd,Elisabeth Lebovici, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando, Sumesh Sharma, Sarah Wilson, Wei Yu

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, Inter national Framings Situating 'Black Artists & Modernism' in Europe

Research Interests:
Feminism, Intersectionality, Black Studies, Art and Globalization, and Conceptualism

The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice investigates the widely debated, deeply flawed yet influential concept of the uncanny through the lens of feminist theory and contemporary art practice. Not merely a subversive strategy but a cipher of the fraught but fertile dialogue between feminism and psychoanalysis, the uncanny makes an ideal vehicle for an arrangement marked by ambivalence and acts as a constant reminder that feminism and psychoanalysis are never quite at home with one another.

The Feminist Uncanny begins by charting the uncanniness of femininity in foundational psychoanalytic texts by Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Mladen Dolar, and contextually introduces a range of feminist responses and appropriations by Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Sarah Kofman, among others. The book also offers thematically organised interpretations of famous artworks and practices informed by feminism, including Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, Faith Ringgold's story quilts and Susan Hiller's 'paraconceptualism', as well as less well-known practice, such as the Women's Postal Art Even (Feministo) and the photomontages of Maud Sulter. Dead (lexicalised) metaphors, unhomely domesticity, identity and (dis)identification, and the tension between family stories and art's histories are examined in and from the perspective of different artistic and critical practices, illustrating different aspects of the feminist uncanny.

Through a 'partisan' yet comprehensive critical review of the fascinating concept of the uncanny, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice proposes a new concept, the feminist uncanny, which it upholds as one of the most enduring legacies of the Women's Liberation Movement in contemporary art theory and practice.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-feminist-uncanny-in-theory-and-art-practice-9781472505583/

BOOK LAUNCH -- ICA, 7pm, 16 September 2016: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/book-launch-art-and-feminisms

Book review: Amy Tobin, 'Homesickness', Oxford Art J (2017) 40 (1): 199-203. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx013

Research Interests:
The Grotesque Body, Sigmund Freud, Abjection, Feminism, Helene Cixous, and 19 moreJulia Kristeva, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, The uncanny, Hélène Cixous, Sarah Kofman, Terry Castle, Susan Hiller, Grotesque, Abject,uncanny, Detournement, Judy Chicago, Feminis-Helene Cixous-The Laugh of the Medusa, Monica Ross, Psychoanalytic Feminism- Love, Power and Religion, Maud Sulter, Sutapa Biswas, Critical Theory (Semiotics, Poststructuralism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Marxism), Bobby Baker, and Feminism and Psychoanalysis

The_Feminist_Uncanny_INDEX.docx

Feminist_Uncanny_introduction_for_web.docx

From the Freud Museum is an installation of fifty labelled archival boxes containing small objects, images and text, displayed in vitrines with their lids open and accompanied by a looped video. Originally commissioned for the Freud Museum in London and shown there in 1994 as At the Freud Museum, the work was purchased by Tate in 1998 and counts the book After the Freud Museum (1995/2000) among its manifestations.
This In Focus project offers the most comprehensive analysis of From the Freud Museum to date, locating it within Hiller’s oeuvre and its critical reception. It explores the work’s evocation of the archive and of the occult, and examines Sigmund Freud and Susan Hiller as collectors of significant fragments.

Published in February 2017, the project is authored by Dr Alexandra Kokoli (Middlesex University London) and includes a contribution from Dr Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London).
ISBN 978-1-84976-532-9

In Focus projects examine artworks in Tate’s collection from a range of perspectives, reflecting contemporary approaches to object-based scholarship. They are typically written by a number of specialists from different disciplines and comprise linked essays that explore particular aspects of the works’ making and history in depth. The projects often draw on Tate’s own research resources, featuring materials found in conservation files, Gallery Records and Tate Archive.

Full text available here: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/from-the-freud-museum-susan-hiller

Research Interests:
Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Archival Studies, Art History, Museum Studies, and 21 moreInstallation Art, Contemporary Art, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Taxonomy, Archives, Sigmund Freud, Feminism, Jacques Derrida, History of Art, Spiritualism, Magic and the Occult (Anthropology Of Religion), Collecting and Collections, Feminist Art History, Object-based image analysis, Occult, Archival Theory, Contemporary Art and Anthropology, Susan Hiller, Anthropology and Art, Freud Museum, and Artists as Curators

A former anthropologist, Susan Hiller has been a pioneer in exploring the interface between the domain of art and the wider world. Her involvement in art and feminism and postcolonial analyses of cultural politics are foregrounded in this volume, which brings together previously published texts and interviews, improvised talks, papers, invitational keynote lectures, discussions with other artists, and more.

The collection of texts documents Susan Hiller's incisive interventions in current debates around the shifting roles of art and theory, shedding new light on the interface between critical writing and visual art practice. Science, magic, the senses, (mis)understandings, and the continuing lure of psychoanalysis are among the subjects that Hiller interrogates. Structured in three sections, the book, simultaneously wide-ranging, worldly, and deeply personal, may read as a portrait of the artist as public intellectual.

The book is part of the Positions series, co-published with Les Presses du réel and dedicated to artists' writings.

Research Interests:
Contemporary Art, Artists' Books, Women Artists, and Artists' Writings

DOI: 10: 1847184057 ISBN-13: 978-1847184054

More Info: With contributions by: Joanne Heath, Ruth Hemus, Alisia Grace Chase, Karen Roulstone, Anthea Behm, Jennifer G. Germann, Catherine Grant, Sue Tate, Alexandra Kokoli, Beth Anne Lauritis, Griselda Pollock and Anne Swartz.

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Performance Art, Women Artists, Feminist Art History, and Griselda Pollock

Articles/book chapters/catalogue essays

This article makes the case for the inclusion of live and performance art in commemorative practice, including specifically the artistic-activist practice of walking, in reference to the complex feminist legacies of the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common (1981-2000). Such practices offer alternatives to the impasses of public sculpture, resonate with Greenham’s feminist aesthetics and politics and prove adept to the celebration and (re-)activation of women’s movements and feminist activism. I focus on practices that seek to disentangle the collective work of activist transmission from the compromised habit of memorialization, showcasing specific performative alternatives to the commissioning of sculptural monuments. Such alternatives operate in a queer time of collectivity and gather momentum through ritual repetition, where remembrance vibrates with the energy of an embodied commitment to continue and expand the work of our chosen feminist foremothers. The practice of Jemima Brown, Elspeth Owen, Anne Robinson, and Nina Wakeford selectively deploys performance across its making and delivery, but mostly (re-)activates a kind of performativity that can never be exhausted in the act of passive spectatorship and demands sustained purchase. At a time when monuments are being toppled, ephemeral interventions prove strangely resilient and efficacious in their responsiveness and their capacity for embodied transmission across the generations and geographies of feminism. The practice of these artists proposes models of heritage-as-activation and transforms the audience into fellow actors, and even activists.
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The final, definitive, and illustrated version is published in PERFORMANCE RESEARCH, VOLUME 28 ISSUE 8, On Activation, Issue editors: Christel Stalpaert with Verónica Tello and Eylül Fidan Akıncı
Publication date: 16 September 2024. Acceptance date: 10 April 2024. https://www.performance-research.org/forthcoming-issue.php

Publication Date: 2024

Publication Name: Performance Research

Research Interests:
Cultural Heritage, Walking (Art), Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, Art and Activism, and 3 more16mm Filmmaking, Greenham Common, and Monuments

Chapter from: Jemima Brown: Peace Camp, 2022, pbk-ISBN 9781399918206. Edited and introduced by Ken Pratt with essays by writer/curator Matilda Strang, feminist historian Dr Alexandra Kokoli and artist Janice McNab. Designed by Dean... more

Chapter from: Jemima Brown: Peace Camp, 2022, pbk-ISBN 9781399918206.

Edited and introduced by Ken Pratt with essays by writer/curator Matilda Strang, feminist historian Dr Alexandra Kokoli and artist Janice McNab. Designed by Dean Pavitt. Photography by Shaun Vincent and Caron Geary.

Publication Date: 2022

Publication Name: Jemima Brown: Peace Camp

Research Interests:
Feminism, Visual Communication for Activism, Feminist Art, Peace, Antinuclear Movement, and 2 moreGreenham Common and Peace Camp

Despite its considerable investment in questions of memory, attachments between subjects and objects, and trauma and its treatment, psychoanalysis has been largely sidelined in the unfolding reassessment of museums. This introduction to the special issue on ‘Trauma and Repair in the Museum’, which aims to reintroduce psychoanalytic perspectives in these debates, outlines the issues around reparation that surround the modern museum due to the traumatic legacies of coloniality. Timothy P. Brown’s notion of how the trauma of displacement and dissociation effects both objects and communities is key to our consideration of the museum as symptomatic of trauma, as is Cathy Caruth’s reading of history as trauma. Referring to several artists’ practices, such as Lisa Reihana, Erika Tan, and especially Kader Attia’s concept of repair, as well as a number of museological approaches to restitution, we expand on the complexities of ongoing coloniality and its implication with museums as institutions, practices of collection and display, and highly charged psychoactive spaces. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s rereading of Melanie Klein’s notion of reparation allows us to posit a form of decolonial repair that involves the assembling of damaged part-objects into ‘something like a whole [but] not necessarily like any preexisting whole’ (2003, p. 128, original emphasis). This approach enables a reckoning with trauma and its legacies that keeps them visible without ruling out processes of reparation. We follow our outline of trauma and repair in the museum with summaries of our contributors’ articles, which expose and unpack the mutual implication of collections, institutions and displays with patriarchy, colonialism and racial capitalism through the critical discourse of contestation, while also acknowledging the potential of museums to overcome their traumatic origins.

DOI: 10.1057/s41282-022-00290-4

Publication Date: 2022

Publication Name: Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Research Interests:
Psychoanalysis, Museum Studies, Museum Education, Psychoanalysis And Literature, and Museums and Identity

The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981-2000) was a women-only camp originally established in protest against nuclear proliferation and the Cold War ideology of deterrence that fuelled the arms race. The peace camp initiated a series of performative protest actions on and off site, including teddy bears’ picnics, and mock weddings of protesters to nuclear warheads by Shirley Cameron and Evelyn Silver. The perimeter fence of the airbase was soon transformed into a permanent if informal gallery of protest, hosting a wealth of visual and material interventions which were widely documented. The Greenham women used a range of print media to communicate amongst themselves and with the world beyond the camp, including newsletters, posters, postcards, and leaflets, most of which were richly illustrated with original artwork.

From an art historical perspective, this material teems with visual iconographies drawing upon ancient myths and symbols already mobilised in women’s movements since the 1960s. In addition to the reclamation of witches and witches’ circles, spider webs were successfully exploited in craftivist performance and evoked in drawing, as a motif of solidarity, connectivity, and soft strength. Mother-and-child iconographies were revisited and reconfigured, in evocation of the familiar maternalism of women’s peace movements yet at the same time sabotaging the visual supports of social reproduction. Many artworks were created at or in reference to Greenham, often by artists with direct experience of the camp, including textile and installation work by Janis Jefferies, Margaret Harrison’s multiple iterations of the reconstructed perimeter fence, Tina Keane’s films of protest and reverie, and Thalia Campbell’s textile collages and banners.

I suggest that Greenham, viewed through the lens of feminist intergenerational transmission, exemplifies Griselda Pollock’s formulation of the virtual feminist museum. Mobilising Aby Warburg’s Nachleben (afterlife/survival by metamorphosis), the virtual feminist museum untethers artefacts, images, and practices from their historical contexts and sets them in motion, tracing their travels, re-occurrences and transformations across time and space. For Pollock, virtuality is not opposed to actuality but vibrates with the possibility of imminent realisation. I propose a curatorial experiment that activates the virtual feminist museum of Greenham Common and feminist anti-nuclear activism more broadly, while also teasing out a repertory of anti-war, anti-patriarchal ‘pathos formulae’ or affectively charged tropes, from care rituals to failing phalluses, and including the playful reclamation of the perimeter fence from its intended function. The highly visual format of the ‘Animating the Archive’ series of British Art Studies helps test Warburg’s quasi-method of tracing iconographic correspondences across disparate spaces, times, and registers, through the dispersed and diverse visual archive of Greenham Common.

DOI: 10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-24/akokoli

Publication Date: 2023

Publication Name: British Art Studies

Research Interests:
Performance Art, Peace Movements, Feminism, Visual Communication for Activism, Feminist Art, and 9 moreFeminist Art History, Aby Warburg, Antinuclear Movement, Protest Songs, Women's movement, Greenham Common, Peace Camp, Demonstrations, and Visual Activism

Beginning with a reflection on the protestors’ dwellings at the Greenham Common women’s peace camp, this chapter examines the multifarious ways in which the domestic sphere is evoked, restaged, critiqued, and reclaimed, across artistic practices and visual activism shaped and motivated by feminism. Dwelling matters as both symbol and material necessity for the survival of vulnerable bodies, sustained by continuous giving and taking of care, and including the feminist struggle for social housing. Rather than a straightforward denouncement of dwelling along with patriarchal domesticity, I argue that feminist art, activism, and their multiple intersections in the work of Paula Chambers, Małgorzata Markiewicz, and Sera Waters, continue to revisit and sometimes recover home-making, its materiality, and symbols, and explore its potential for nurturing feminist subjects. Proceeding through a mix of scholarship and personal meditation on intuitively collected research materials, the chapter carves a speculative path through apparently distinct instances of feminist politics across activism and creative practice to propose new perspectives on the complex interface between feminism, labour, bodies, and the stuff of home.

https://www.routledge.com/Feminist-Visual-Activism-and-the-Body/Sliwinska/p/book/9780367278991

Research Interests:
Domesticity, Visual Communication for Activism, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, Dwelling, and 7 moreGreenham Common, Martha Rosler, Alexis Hunter, Visual Activism, Małgorzata Markiewicz, Paula Chambers, and Sera Waters

This chapter explores some tensions in both textile theories and practices informed by the feminist 1970s. While tracing the lines between radical and reformist approaches to women's textiles, it pinpoints moments of intersection and permeability. Oscillating between a play for canonization and a debunking of the art world's selection criteria, feminist textiles both prefigure and feed into the diversity of craft's deployments in contemporary art practice. Omnipresent, pervasive, and resistant to coherent classification, textiles are interwoven into the private and public practices of every culture, both formal and informal, quotidian and ceremonial. The chapter discusses the difficulty of containing feminism and textiles by considering some of their tensions and contradictions in foundational feminist art historical and practice‐led thought. Considering the centrality of the art/craft/anti‐art debates in feminist cultural politics, it is unsurprising that a critical attention to textiles features prominently in foundational moments of feminist art history.

DOI: 10.1002/9781118768730.ch12

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: A Companion to Textile Culture

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Textiles, Modern and contemporary crafts (Art), Feminist Art, Canon Formation, and 4 moreFeminist Art History, Griselda Pollock, Quilting, and Miriam Schapiro

In this chapter, I revisit my article ‘On Probation: “Tracey Emin” as Sign’ (Wasafiri, 2010), to
pose the question anew of what ‘Emin’ stands for in the widely diverse discourses that claim to
address her and her work. Despite her recent (relative) retreat from media exposure, Emin still looms large as a cipher of artistic deskilling, narcissism, and the assumed money-grabbing
vulgarity and inauthenticity of the most heavily promoted British art at the end of the
twentieth century, while also making a convenient target for right-wing backlash against feminisms
and conceptualisms, broadly defined. The chapter is largely devoted to a close reading of a minor
exhibition and its catalogue that received some media exposure largely thanks to its deployment of
Emin’s image: in Treason of the Scholars (2015), painter Peter Goodfellow and his conservative allies
make of ‘Emin’ a malleable sign that encompasses all the ills of contemporary culture as they see it.
‘Emin’’s malign manipulation in this case represents an extreme case of the widespread practice of
(ab)using ‘Emin’ as sign and of consistently overdetermining her by emptying her/it out.

The final and definite version of this chapter is published in TRACEY EMIN: ART INTO LIFE, edited by Alexandra Kokoli and Deborah Cherry (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 71-87.
ISBN: 9781350160606
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/tracey-emin-9781350160606/

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Tracey Emin: Art into Life

Research Interests:
Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, Roger Scruton, Backlash, Antifeminism, and 3 moreDeskilling in Contemporary Art Practice, Tracey Emin, and Deskilling

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Katy Deepwell (ed.), Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020), pp. 134-143.

Research Interests:
Nonviolence, Feminism, Feminist activism, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, and 7 moreAby Warburg, Griselda Pollock, Antinuclear Movement, Feminist Cultural Activisms, Greenham Common, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Feminist Pacifism

’Read My QR: Quilla Constance and the Conceptualist Promise of Intelligibility’, in Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok and Sophie Orlando (eds.), Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, International Framings: Situating 'Black Artists & Modernism' in Europe, Van AbbeMuseum, 2019, pp. 36-53. Open access epub: https://mediabank.vanabbemuseum.nl/vam/files/alexandria/publiciteit/e-pub/2019/vam_epub%20BAM_DEC19_V5_final3.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3oiqrzzzNBl5yvWIrltVjLG4kLiVcX-6z_iXUKLGw-jsXHQOb1VqsEvjQ

This chapter contributes to the on-going questioning of the definitions of conceptualism from feminist psychoanalytic perspectives and in reference specifically to the practice of British artist Quilla Constance, aka #QC, the post-punk, neo-glam, gender-questioning performance persona of Jennifer Allen. In #QC’s practice identity politics is not represented but produced, and its production is framed in an exploration of the boundaries between sense, nonsense and different kinds of sensibility and intelligibility, acknowledging the inflection of knowledge and its systems by the vicissitudes of power. I consider how the intelligibility of power, affect and desire is both entertained and resisted in #QC’s work and will begin to outline how #QC’s performative engagement with visual and material culture reveals a nuanced understanding of identity and (dis)identification and the role of art practice in mining them. Her video piece Pukijam (2015) scrutinises food as a signifying system onto which social class and ethnic identities are mapped out, from fried chicken in cardboard take-away boxes to tea in fine bone china cups. The live performance equivalent of this tension between opacity and semiotic plenitude can be found in #QC’s lectures, in which a rigorous engagement with critical theory devolves (or evolves) into inarticulate cries. Uncomfortably juxtaposed, #QC’s lecturing voice and her screams trace the boundaries of linguistic intelligibility and probingly reference conceptualism’s deployment of art as a reading instrument for visual culture.

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, International Framings: Situating 'Black Artists & Modernism' in Europe

Research Interests:
Performance Studies, Black/African Diaspora, Visual Semiotics, Performance Art, Black feminism, and 8 moreConceptual Art, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, Intersectionality, Edouard Glissant, Intersectional Feminism, Joan Copjec, and Quilla Constance

Publication Date: 2019

Research Interests:
Contemporary Art, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, and Intersectionality

Exhibition leaflet for HOME STRIKE, guest-curated by Alexandra Kokoli and Basia Sliwinska, with CANAN, Paula Chambers, Malgorzata Markiewicz and Su Richardson, l'etrangere, 8 March-21 April 2018.... more

Research Interests:
Installation Art, Contemporary Art, Domesticity, Domestic Space, Biopolitics, and 7 moreFeminist activism, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, Motherhood, Motherhood Studies, Crochet, Lace, Textiles, and Feminist theory (performance & art)

Catherine Hoffmann's Free Lunch with the Stench Wench is a performance of abjection and self-abjection through poverty with an apotropaic aspiration: to shed the shame through sharing, and to create opportunities for a common social subjectivity that refuses to be silent about the struggle of its own creation and maintenance. Despite its title, Free Lunch does not come with a free lunch for the audience but creates an olfactory situation, through the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat, which complements Hoffmann's narration and stage presence into a synaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychosocial fallout. Drawing on the psychological foundations of shame studies, sociological approaches and social-theoretical responses to austerity and social division, I propose to examine the gendered embodiment of shame and its exorcism in Hoffmann's performance, focusing on its physical codification in and beyond the visual. I explore the potential of shame to be re-weaponized against those who originally inflict it, and consider the shame that haunts every creative act, especially those with high political stakes: the failure to make a connection, the fear of being misunderstood.

DOI: 10.1111/hypa.12399

Journal Name: Hypatia

Publication Date: Jan 23, 2018

Publication Name: Hypatia

Research Interests:
Performance Studies, Shame Theory, Performance Art, Performance, Feminist Art, and 11 moreIntersectionality and Social Inequality, Affect (Cultural Theory), Feminist Art History, Intersectionality, Shame, Silvan Tomkins, Austerity, Intersectional Feminism, Politics of Austerity, Anti austerity Protests, and feminism and class

The collection brings together original papers in philosophy, culture studies, art theory, theory of textile culture, and theory of architecture to give a comprehensive overview of weaving as a political, cultural and artistic practice. The first part, The Politics of Weaving, examines weaving as a paradigmatic political metaphor for the construction of the European identity and citizenship. The second part, The Culture of Weaving, explores issues of textile theory and practice. The third part, Weaving and Architecture, explores the influence of the practice of weaving to architectural works; the final part, Arts and the Art of Weaving, presents the curatorial and artistic project “Weaving Europe: The World as Meditation” that was part of the European Capital of Culture Pafos 2017 program.
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Ο τόµος αυτός περιέχει πρωτότυπα κείµενα από τα πεδία της φιλοσοφίας, των πολιτιστικών σπουδών, της θεωρίας της τέχνης, της θεωρίας και ιστορίας της υφαντικής, και της θεωρίας της αρχιτεκτονικής, τα οποία δίνουν µία ολοκληρωµένη εικόνα της υφαντικής ως πολιτική, πολιτισµική και καλλιτεχνική πρακτική. Στο πρώτο µέρος, µε τίτλο "Η πολιτική της υφαντικής", εξετάζεται η υφαντική ως παραδειγµατική πολιτική µεταφορά για την κατασκευή της ευρωπαϊκής ταυτότητας και της ιθαγένειας. Το δεύτερο µέρος, "Ο πολιτισµός της υφαντικής", εξετάζει ζητήµατα θεωρίας και πρακτικής σχετικά µε την θέµα. Το τρίτο µέρος, "Υφαντική και αρχιτεκτονική", διερευνά την επιρροή των πρακτικών της υφαντικής σε αρχιτεκτονικά έργα. Τέλος, το τέταρτο µέρος, "Τέχνες και η τέχνη της υφαντικής", παρουσιάζει την έκθεση καλλιτεχνών µε τίτλο "Υφαίνοντας την Ευρώπη: Ο κόσµος ως στοχασµός", που ήταν µέρος του προγράµµατος «Πάφος πολιτιστική πρωτεύουσα 2017».

Research Interests:
Philosophy, Cultural Theory, Architectural Theory, Theory of Art, Curating contemporary art, and History and Theory of Textiles

A contribution to the catalogue for the exhibition Weaving Europe: the World as Meditation, curated by Efi Kyprianidou, Αttikon, 2-31 December 2017, Pafos 2017, European Capital of Culture,... more

A contribution to the catalogue for the exhibition Weaving Europe: the World as Meditation, curated by Efi Kyprianidou, Αttikon, 2-31 December 2017, Pafos 2017, European Capital of Culture, http://www.pafos2017.eu/en/event/weaving-europe-the-world-as-meditation/

Publication Name: Weaving Europe, edited by Efi Kyprianidou, Nisos Publications, 2017

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Textiles, Feminist Philosophy, Conceptual Metaphor, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and 10 moreMetaphor, Craft Knowledge, Feminist Art, Margaret Atwood, Feminist Art History, Jean Laplanche, Odyssey, Didier Anzieu, Textile Thinking, and Craft Thinking

Published in CUT CLOTH: Contemporary Textiles and Feminism, ed. Sarah-Joy Ford (PO Publishing, 2017), pp. 60-65.
ISBN: 978-1-910846-04-9
https://www.cutcloth.co.uk/

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Textiles, History of Textiles, Judith Butler, Feminist Art History, and 3 morePsychoanalysis and art, Craft, and Craftivism

Art informed by second-wave feminism has often cast domestic space as a site of ambivalence if not unhomeliness, inspired by gender-critical dissent. This article expands on previous research into the strategic unhomeliness of feminist art by focusing on works informed by anti-nuclear activism as well as feminism in the 1980s. Drawing on psychoanalytic approaches to conflict, I trace anti-nuclear (per)mutations of dystopian domesticity in feminist visual and material cultures that give form to the collective nightmare of a nuclear holocaust. In the art practice under consideration domesticity is thrown into crisis anew: the home is expanded into a site of pacifist resistance while also being cast as the place of the feared premature and violent death of loved ones by nuclear disaster. Motherhood and gendered care-giving are simultaneously challenged and mobilised in the consciousness-raising performances and posters of Sister Seven, as well as Margaret Harrison’s recreations of the periphery fence of the Greenham Common RAF military base. The feminist pacifist – curative – response to the threat of nuclear war as a ‘paranoid elaboration of mourning’ (Fornari) is pre-emptive mourning, which, unlike pre-emptive strikes, rises to the defence of survival.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx004

Research Interests:
Peace Movements, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, Psychoanalysis and art, Craft, and 8 moreGreenham Common, Anti-Nuclear Movement, Craftivism, Jacqueline Rose, Greenham Common Peace Movement, Margaret Harrison, Franco Fornari, and Feminist Uncanny

The final, definitive and illustrated version of this book chapter is published in: Susan Hiller and Suzanne Treister (eds.), Monica Ross: Ethical Actions - A Critical Fine Art Practice (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), pp. 22-31.... more

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Contemporary Art, Performance Art, Mourning, British art, and 9 moreFeminist Art History, Time Based Art, Mieke Bal, 20th Century British Art, Mourning and melancholia, Monica Ross, Angela McRobbie, Time-based-media, and Sutapa Biswas

Text commissioned by curators Day + Gluckman for the exhibition ‘Liberties’, Collyer Bristow Gallery, 2 July – 21 October 2015. http://www.dayandgluckman.co.uk/liberties/

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Women in Art, Feminism, Feminist Art, and 10 moreWomen Artists, Feminist Art History, Feminism and Social Justice, Mieke Bal, British Black Arts, Monica Ross, Feminist Performance Art, Sutapa Biswas, Rosie the Riveter, and Black British Artists

The final and definitive version of this article is published in Women & Performance (Aug 2015), in the special issue 'Texting Girls: Images, Sounds, and Words in Neoliberal Cultures of Femininity', guest-edited by Kimberly Lamm.

DOI:10.1080/0740770X.2015.1057015

This article debunks the wide-spread view that young female celebrities, especially those who rise to fame through reality shows and other forms of media-orchestrated self-exposure, dodge ‘real’ work out of laziness, fatalism and a misguided sense of entitlement. Instead, we argue that becoming a celebrity in a neoliberal economy such as that of the United Kingdom, where austerity measures disproportionately disadvantage the young, women and the poor is not as irregular or exceptional a choice as previously thought, especially since the precariousness of celebrity earning power adheres to the current demands of the neoliberal economy on its workforce. What is more, becoming a celebrity involves different forms of labour that are best described as biopolitical, since such labour fully involves and consumes the human body and its capacities as a living organism. Weight gain and weight loss, pregnancy, physical transformation through plastic surgery, physical symptoms of emotional distress and even illness and death are all photographically documented and supplemented by extended textual commentary, usually with direct input from the celebrity, reinforcing and expanding on the visual content. As well as casting celebrity work as labour, we also maintain that the workings of celebrity should always be examined in the context of wider cultural and real economies.

Research Interests:
Welfare State, Celebrity Culture, Reality television, Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, and 7 moreRepresentation, Austerity Measures, Gender/social class/ reality television, Tabloidization, Tabloid Journalism, Sensationalism, Tabloid Journalism, and Affect Studies and Affective Labour

In response to Rozsika Parker’s (2010:xi-xxii) preoccupation with charting continuity and change in both the gendered meanings of craft and the work of women artists employing craft techniques and materials, in this article, I reflect on my experience of curating a retrospective exhibition of crochet and mixed media works by Su Richardson, a participant in the collaborative mail art (1975-1977) and installation project Feministo (various venues, including the ICA, 1977). Superficially, Richardson’s domestic iconography has grown in mainstream popularity, as has the use of craft, yet the political, aesthetic and historical specificity of her oeuvre should not be misrecognised: these self-reflectively home-made objects stir the unconscious of domesticity, femininity and their mutual implication from decidedly feminist perspectives. Following Parker (2010:xxi), I argue that threads of influence and dialogue in textiles informed by feminism are often oblique, broken and
unexpectedly tangled. If Richardson’s retrospective aimed to forge links not only between past and contemporary feminisms but also with current DIY aesthetics and countercultural practices, contemporary artists working with textiles mine
a wealth of cultural and artistic references, suggesting complex and transgressive webs of kinship. Bronwyn Platten’s quilted homage to Mike Kelley, For more and more love hours (R.I.P. Mike Kelley 1954-2012) (1973-2013), is an example of a work in which such cultural and artistic references are brought to the fore. In it, Platten questions Faith Wilding’s dismissal of his work as an abject reification of ‘bad boy masculinity’ (Wilding 2000:94), to propose feminist and gender-critical alliances across genders and generations.
Open access: http://www.imageandtext.up.ac.za/images/files/issue23/23_2014_not_a_straight_line_by_a_spiral_charting_continuity_and_change_in_textiles_informed_by_feminism.pdf

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Domesticity, Mourning, Modern and contemporary crafts (Art), Feminist Art, and 6 moreFeminist Art History, Craftivism, Su Richardson, Feminism, Craft, Mike Kelley, Rozsika Parker, and Bronwyn Platten

The book is free to download here: http://www.hammeronpress.net/PHA_PDF_SPREADS.pdf Or you can purchase a hard copy here: http://www.hammeronpress.net/page20.htm

Research Interests:
Corporate University, University, and Casualisation in Higher Education

Research Interests:
Art Theory, Contemporary Art, Archives, Jacques Lacan, Conceptual Art, and 5 moreThe uncanny, Sound Art, Voice, Susan Hiller, and Interpellation

Publication Name: Rachel Dickson (ed.), Judy Chicago (and Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Tracey Emin), Ben Uri in association with Lund Humphries, 2012, pp. 169-177

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Feminist Art, Women Artists, Feminist Art History, Louise Bourgeois, and 3 moreJudy Chicago, Tracey Emin, and Helen Chadwick

In response to the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by police in London in 2005, artist Monica Ross decided to try and learn the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by heart. She first attempted to publicly recite the Declaration from memory in the performance rights repeated – an act of memory at Beaconsfield, London, 2005. This has since become the series Anniversary – an act of memory, beginning with a solo recitation by Ross to mark the 60th anniversary of the Declaration in 2008. The series approaches performance as a live and generative medium, with recitations recorded using photography and video, edited in consultation with the co-recitors and posted on you tube as an open archive. Resisting the impulse to foreground the content of such an explicitly political work, I argue that it is in the structure of this performance in sixty acts and its temporal unfolding in time and place, across different contexts and communities, that its political and ethical significance lies. The inevitable pauses in each recitation find their counterpart in the patient, discreet and sympathetic waiting of the co-recitors and the artist herself, who are assigned the double role of performer and audience. I turn to the critical apparatus of psychoanalysis, not only because it elaborates the links between remembering and repetition, which are viewed as not simply connected but as part of a dialectic, but also because, in its practice (analysis), it both requires and values a great deal of waiting. Anniversary is contextualised among other works by Monica Ross and others, with particular reference to the impact of feminism on art practice.

DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2012.728436

Issue: 5

Volume: 17

Page Numbers: 24-30

Publication Date: Oct 9, 2012

Publication Name: Performance Research

Research Interests:
Performance Art, Durational Event Led Practice, Feminist Art, Jean Laplanche, and Monica Ross

More Info: The final version is published as: ‘The “woman artist” as curatorial effect: The Case of Tracey Emin's Scottish Retrospective’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (eds.), Politics in a Glass Case: Exhibiting Women’s and Feminist Art (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 187-204

Research Interests:
Curating, Feminist Art, Women Artists, Feminist Art History, and Tracey Emin

More Info: Exhibition by Su Richardson, curated by Alexandra Kokoli, Goldsmiths Special Collections, 6 July-9 September 2012. http://www.gold.ac.uk/library/exhibitions

Research Interests:
Curating, Modern and contemporary crafts (Art), Feminist Art, Women Artists, and Feminist Art History

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2004

Publication Name: n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, vol. 13: Domestic Politics

Research Interests:
Domesticity, Feminist Art, Women Artists, Mail Art, Feminist Art History, and 5 moreThe uncanny, Craft, Su Richardson, Feminism, Craft, Monica Ross, and Kate Walker

Publisher: openair.rgu.ac.uk

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2006

Research Interests:
Contemporary Art, The uncanny, Susan Hiller, and Conceptualism

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2010

Publication Name: Wasafiri

Research Interests:
Whiteness Studies, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, Young British Artists, and Tracey Emin

Publisher: openair.rgu.ac.uk

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008

Research Interests:
Feminist Art History

Publisher: openair.rgu.ac.uk

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008

Research Interests:
Feminist Art, Women Artists, and Feminist Art History

Publication Name: Jodi O’Brien (ed.), Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, 2 vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009)

Research Interests:
Women in Art, Feminist aesthetics, Feminist Art, Women Artists, and Feminist Art History

Publication Name: Jodi O’Brien (ed.), Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, 2 vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009)

Research Interests:
Design, Public Art, Design Theory, Modern and contemporary crafts (Art), Feminist Art, and 7 moreFeminist Art History, Ceramics, Relational aesthetics, Community Art, Craftivism, Conceptual function, and Social Engagement

Publication Name: Jodi O’Brien (ed.), Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, 2 vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009)

Research Interests:
Gender and Sexuality, Feminist Art History, Gaze and Representation, and Queer Art History

Publication Name: Jodi O’Brien (ed.), Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, 2 vols. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009)

Research Interests:
Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Sigmund Freud, and 2 moreLacanian theory and Freud and Lacan

Publication Name: Diana Newall and G. F. Pooke (eds.), Fifty Key Texts in Art History (London: Routledge, 2012)

Research Interests:
Art History, Feminist Theory, Women Artists, and Feminist Art History

Publication Name: Diana Newall and G. F. Pooke (eds.), Fifty Key Texts in Art History (London: Routledge, 2012)

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Film Theory, Fetishism, and Gaze and Representation

Publication Name: Diana Newall and G. F. Pooke (eds.), Fifty Key Texts in Art History (London: Routledge, 2012)

Research Interests:
Art History, Feminist Theory, The Body, French Feminism, Feminist Art History, and Hélène Cixous

Reviews

Publication Name: Art Selector, no. 5: Text in Art – special issue (July 2011)

Research Interests:
Women in Art, Feminism, Curating, Women Artists, and Feminist Art History

Published in Gender & History (ISSN 0953-5233)
Vol.27 No.1 April 2015, pp. 228–229
DOI: 10.1111/1468-0424.12117

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Women in Art, Feminist Art, Women Artists, Feminist Art History, and 6 moreWomen in Contemporary Art, Craft, Feminist Art Los Angeles, Judy Chicago, Feminist Art Movement, and The Dinner Party

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008

Publication Name: The F-Word: Contemporary UK Feminism

Research Interests:
Intersectionality and Social Inequality and Makeover Television

Publisher: Wiley Online Library

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2007

Publication Name: Art History

Research Interests:
Feminist Art, Women Artists, and Feminist Art History

Publisher: Wiley Online Library

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2007

Publication Name: The Art Book

Research Interests:
Contemporary Art, Young British Artists, and Tracey Emin

Publisher: openair.rgu.ac.uk

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2006

Research Interests:
Autobiography, Women Artists, Young British Artists, and Tracey Emin

Publisher: Wiley Online Library

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2005

Publication Name: The Art Book

Research Interests:
Contemporary Art, Cultural Memory, Feminist Art, Women Artists, Art and Cultural Theory, Postcolonialism, Gender and Feminism, and 2 moreLaura Mulvey and Sutapa Biswas

Publisher: Wiley Online Library

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2010

Publication Name: The Art Book

Research Interests:
Contemporary Art and Conceptual Art

Publisher: Wiley Online Library

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2007

Publication Name: The Art Book

Research Interests:
Contemporary Art, Women Artists, and Feminist Art History

Publisher: Wiley Online Library

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2009

Publication Name: The Art Book

Research Interests:
Psychoanalysis, Performance Studies, Contemporary Art, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, and Subjectivity

Publisher: Wiley Online Library

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2005

Publication Name: The Art Book

Publisher: interscience.wiley.com

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008

Publication Name: The Art Book

Research Interests:
Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Art, and Postcolonial Theory

Opinion pieces & interviews

Talks

This paper examines two case studies that illustrate Rozsika Parker’s description of the evolution of feminism and embroidery as a spiral rather than a straight line: the recent retrospective exhibition of crochet and mixed media by Su Richardson (Goldsmiths, 2012), a participant in the collaborative mail art and installation project Feministo (1975-1977); and Bronwyn Platten’s quilted homage to Mike Kelley, ‘For more and more love hours’, which questions Faith Wilding’s dismissal of Kelley’s work as an abject reification of ‘bad boy’ masculinity, to suggest feminist and gender-critical alliances across genders and generations.

Podcast available here: http://magiclantern.gold.ac.uk/podcasts/library/substitch/KOKOLI.Alexandra.M.SubversiveStitch.291113.m4a

More Info: Presentation at 'The Subversive Stitch revisited: The politics of cloth', a two-day conference exploring the legacy of Rozsika Parker's groundbreaking book, The Subversive Stitch. Victoria and Albert Museum, 29-30 November 2013.

Research Interests:
Textiles, Modern and contemporary crafts (Art), Women Artists, Feminist Art History, Su Richardson, Feminism, Craft, and Mike Kelley

Contribution to the event 'Misogyny: Witches and Wicked Bodies', ICA, 18 March 2015 (https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/misogyny-witches-and-wicked-bodies), organised by Katy Deepwell with a keynote by Deanna Petherbridge, chaired by Hilary... more

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Women in Art, French Feminism, European Witch Trials, Women Artists, and 7 moreWitchcraft (Anthropology Of Religion), British witchcraft, Witchcraft, Religion and Magic, Feminist Art History, Early Modern European Witchcraft, Medieval Misogyny, and Misogyny

Abstract: In this interview, Alexandra M. Kokoli speaks to Brighton-based artist Anna Dumitriu’s about the Normal Flora Project (www.normalflora.co.uk), which aims to dispel common misconceptions about bacteria, make the invisible visible while drawing attention to the aesthetic qualities of this omnipresent yet neglected ecosystem. Dumitriu uses a wide range of media, combining the most traditional (such as crocheting, embroidery and drawing) with cutting-edge technology and scientific methods of analysis. Her work is transdisciplinary and often collaborative, requiring active audience participation and co-operation between artists and scientists. She is Director of the Institute of Unnecessary Research (www.unnecessaryresearch.org), which she founded in 2005.
Author: Alexandra M. Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Fine Arts at Middlesex University, London

The illustrated, final and definitive version of this interview is published in n.paradoxa: http://www.ktpress.co.uk/

Research Interests:
Bioart and The Sublime

Although usually associated with so-called ‘fringe’ movements, we have recently witnessed a proliferation of survivalist phenomena both in the margins and mainstream. In 2008 MSNBC reported that ‘in hard times, some flirt with survivalism: Economic Angst has some Americans stockpiling “beans, bullets and Band-Aids”’. A virtual explosion of survivalist film and TV has followed, from The Walking Dead to Bear Grylls’ Running Wild and Mission Survive. With a fully mediatised survivalism as its context, British satirical periodical The Daily Mash recently published an article claiming that: ‘Bear Grylls’ latest challenge is to live in London while earning £12.50 an hour’. While a spoof, the piece places both Grylls and survivalism as entertainment back in the context of the economic crisis and austerity, which in turn sparked the proliferation and popularity of survivalist trends. Furthermore, it juxtaposes survivalism with the often desperate conditions of survival under which a growing number of British people live. While Grylls’ survival skills are performed for our entertainment and are celebrated, those who really must survive in poverty under austerity receive no recognition for their considerable resourcefulness and resilience. So-called ‘poverty porn’ reality shows portray real people struggling for survival while living off benefits (social security) or being perpetually under-employed. The subjects of this reality TV genre are demonised as ‘scroungers’ in media representations and threatened with ever-greater cuts in real life, since ‘poverty porn’ has arguably emerged as an ideological tool that smooths the way for increased austerity, consistently affecting the most vulnerable. While Bear Grylls’ survival in the wild inspires awe, economic survival closer to home makes for an abject spectacle, further deepening the social divide that caused it in the first place. They each constitute different aspects of survivalist media entertainment. This PowerPoint presentation takes The Daily Mash piece as a starting point and explores the role of increased economic and political insecurity and disenfranchisement, the neo-liberal rejection of the social and promotion of individualism, in the expansion and diversification of survivalist phenomena and media. We use images and stills from journalistic representations of the economic crisis, survivalist fictional and reality TV genres, as well as data about the effects of austerity, unemployment, homelessness, urban degeneration and gentrification. We aim to complicate and enrich common conceptions of survivalism and survivalist media with a reflection on poverty and economic survival.

Published in InMediaRes: A Media Commons Project (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/), under the theme 'Survivalist Media', December 2015: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2015/11/22/what-bear-grylls-can-t-do-survivalist-mediascapes-austerity-britain

Publication Date: 2015

Publication Name: in media res: a media commons project

Research Interests:
Austerity, Survivalism, Austerity Measures, Survivalists, Politics of Austerity, and 3 moreSurvivalist Entrepreneurs, Bear Grylls, and Survivalist Media

Download (.pptx)

Research Interests:
Celebrity Culture, Feminism, Neoliberalism, Celebrity journalism, Celebrity, and 7 moreAusterity, Celebrity Studies, Classism, Austerity Measures, Micro-Celebrity, How Media Protrarys Working Class Women Around the World., and Heterosexim/Racism/Ethnocentrism/Classism/Sexism

More Info: Poster presented at the symposium, 'Working with Monica Ross', University of Brighton, 8 March 2014

Research Interests:
Collaboration, Feminist Art, Women Artists, Feminist Art History, and Monica Ross

Scientific publications/Publications scientifiques

Éditée par le Van Abbemuseum d’Eindhoven, sous la direction de Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok et Sophie Orlando, cette publication marque l’aboutissement d’un programme de recherche international porté par l’University of the Arts London.

Proposant une relecture du conceptualisme et de sa supposée résistance aux politiques de l’identité, ce livre détaille les manières dont des artistes conceptuel.le.s se sont emparé.e.s, en Europe, de considérations migratoires, de genre, de classe, de sexe ou de race, après les bouleversements politiques et sociaux de 1968. D’approche intersectionnelle, cette réflexion s’articule autour de quatre focus, respectivement consacrés au travail de Nil Yalter, Stanley Brouwn, David Medalla et Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc.

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, eds.

Research Interests:
Black feminism, Modernism (Art History), Conceptual Art, David Medalla, Conceptualism, and 3 moreStanley Brouwn, Nil Yalter, and Mathieu Abonnenc

Papers

Publication Date: Jan 31, 2008

Research Interests:
Art, Feminism, Fetishism, and Psychoanalytic Theory

Publisher: Informa

Publication Date: Mar 3, 2023

Publication Name: Routledge eBooks

Research Interests:
Artefact Assemblage Studies (archaeology)

Publication Date: Oct 5, 2012

Publication Name: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society

Publication Date: Oct 5, 2012

Publication Name: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society

Research Interests:
Quilting

Publication Date: Oct 5, 2012

Publication Name: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society

Publication Date: Oct 5, 2012

Publication Name: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society

Publisher: Wiley

Publication Date: Aug 1, 2009

Publication Name: The Art Book

Research Interests:
Art Theory and Criticism and Representation Politics

Alexandra Kokoli reviews Tracy Emin's Strangeland, which contains autobiographical writings touching on rape, abortion and marginalization

Publication Date: Dec 31, 2006

Research Interests:
Rape, Feminism, and Abortion

Publication Date: 2016

Research Interests:
Political Science and Uncanny

Publication Date: 2016

Research Interests:
Art and Nuclear Weapon

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Publication Name: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Publication Name: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society

Research Interests:
Quilting

Publication Name: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society

Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Publication Name: Encyclopedia of Gender and Society

Chairing Panel Discussion for Book Launch: Art and Feminisms at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London with Prof Hilary Robinson, Dr Alexandra Kokoli, Dr Basia Sliwinska, and artist Joanna Rajkowska, 16 September 2016. This event celebrated three recent publications from the CREATE/feminisms research cluster, School of Art and Design, Middlesex University: The Female Body in the Looking-glass: Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland by Basia Sliwinska (I.B. Tauris, 2016), The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice by Alexandra Kokoli (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), and the revised edition of the indispensable Feminism-Art-Theory, edited by Hilary Robinson (Blackwell, 2015). The authors invited me to be the chair for the roundtable, which was joined also by artist Joanna Rajkowska. The roundtable considered the shifting landscape between and across feminism, art practice and theory

Publication Date: Sep 16, 2016

Research Interests:
Art History, Art, Feminism, and Uncanny

A short discussion of The Feminist Art Project's inception.

Publisher: Humanities Commons

Publication Date: Mar 14, 2019

Research Interests:
Contemporary Art, Feminism, Feminist Art History, Feminisms, and American art

Publication Date: 2014

Research Interests:
Computer Science and Prefix

Programme and Abstracts for conference, Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, held at Middlesex University, 2 July 2018.This event was organised by Katy Deepwell for the Create/Feminisms research cluster in the Visual Arts Department, Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, Middlesex University.Conference themes:How do the practices of feminist art workers and activists identify, comment, reflect, address and question issues related to changes in civil and political rights over their bodies; campaigns around health and social care and violence against women; in anti-nuclear and anti-militarist campaigns for the end of conflicts or for peace; in protests about women's rights as workers, citizens, refugees or migrants; for LGBTQI rights; for disability rights?2018 marks 100 years since women in the UK over 30 and with a property qualification obtained the vote. Beyond the fact of SOME women's enfranchisement as citizens, many questions about women’s legal and political rights...

Publication Date: 2018

Research Interests:
Gender Studies, Art, Human Rights, Politics, Feminism, and 4 moreFeminist Art, Refugee, The Arts, and Middlesex University

Publication Date: 2016

Research Interests:
Sociology

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Publication Date: Mar 1, 2010

Publication Name: Wasafiri

Research Interests:
History, Cultural Studies, Literature, Literary Theory, Literary studies, and 2 moreFutures Contract and Rowe

Publisher: Wiley

Publication Date: Nov 1, 2007

Publication Name: The Art Book

Research Interests:
History, Art History, Art, Contemporary Art, Performance Art, and 2 moreWomen Artists and Feminist Art History

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Publication Date: Dec 12, 2007

Publication Name: Art History

Research Interests:
History, Art History, and Art Theory and Criticism

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Publication Date: Mar 1, 2017

Publication Name: Oxford Art Journal

Research Interests:
Sociology, Gender Studies, Aesthetics, Peace Movements, Feminism, and 15 moreSubversion, Feminist Art, Feminist Art History, Psychoanalysis and art, Craft, Greenham Common, Anti-Nuclear Movement, Art Theory and Criticism, Craftivism, Scholarship, Jacqueline Rose, Greenham Common Peace Movement, Margaret Harrison, Franco Fornari, and Feminist Uncanny

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing plc

Publication Date: 2016

Publication Name: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks

Research Interests:
Sociology, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Theory, Feminism, Femininity, and 3 morePsychoanalytic Theory, Ambivalence, and Uncanny

This chapter provides a sustained analysis of the developments of Emin&amp;amp;amp;#39;s practice as an artist, assessing her engagement with varied media and the creative exchanges and experimentation of her multi-media practice. The chapter also assesses the changes that have taken place in Emin&amp;amp;amp;#39;s critical interpretation from her early works in the 1990s to her recent practice, tracking the shifts in her public persona from Young British Artist to national treasure.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: Bloomsbury Visual Arts eBooks

Research Interests:
History, Contemporary Art, Feminism, Women Artists, Adventure, and 2 moreInstallation and Curating contemporary art

Publisher: Winchester University Press

Publication Date: May 16, 2016

Publication Name: Manchester University Press eBooks

Research Interests:
Art History, Art, Alchemy, Spiritualism, Conversation, and 2 moreVisual Arts and University of Manchester

Publication Date: Mar 18, 2015

Research Interests:
Sociology

Publication Date: Jul 10, 2018

Research Interests:
Political Science

Publication Date: Mar 8, 2018

Research Interests:
Art History, Art, and Exhibition

Publication Date: Dec 17, 2017

Research Interests:
Art and Feminism

Publication Date: Jun 23, 2017

Research Interests:
Computer Science

Published in CUT CLOTH: Contemporary Textiles and Feminism, ed. Sarah-Joy Ford (PO Publishing, 2017), pp. 60-65. ISBN: 978-1-910846-04-9 https://www.cutcloth.co.uk/

Publication Date: Jul 4, 2017

Research Interests:
Sociology, Feminist Theory, Textiles, History of Textiles, Judith Butler, and 5 moreFeminist Art History, Psychoanalysis and art, Craft, Ambivalence, and Craftivism

From the Freud Museum is an installation of fifty labelled archival boxes containing small objects, images and text, displayed in vitrines with their lids open and accompanied by a looped video. Originally commissioned for the Freud Museum in London and shown there in 1994 as At the Freud Museum, the work was purchased by Tate in 1998 and counts the book After the Freud Museum (1995/2000) among its manifestations. This In Focus project offers the most comprehensive analysis of From the Freud Museum to date, locating it within Hiller’s oeuvre and its critical reception. It explores the work’s evocation of the archive and of the occult, and examines Sigmund Freud and Susan Hiller as collectors of significant fragments. Published in February 2017, the project is authored by Dr Alexandra Kokoli (Middlesex University London) and includes a contribution from Dr Joanne Morra (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London). ISBN 978-1-84976-532-9 In Focus projects examine artworks in Tate’s collection from a range of perspectives, reflecting contemporary approaches to object-based scholarship. They are typically written by a number of specialists from different disciplines and comprise linked essays that explore particular aspects of the works’ making and history in depth. The projects often draw on Tate’s own research resources, featuring materials found in conservation files, Gallery Records and Tate Archive.

Publication Date: Feb 23, 2017

Research Interests:
Anthropology, Archival Studies, Art History, Art, Museum Studies, and 15 moreInstallation Art, Contemporary Art, Archives, Feminism, Jacques Derrida, History of Art, Collecting and Collections, Feminist Art History, Archival Theory, Contemporary Art and Anthropology, Anthropology and Art, Object Based Image Analysis, Freud Museum, Artists as Curators, and evocation

Publication Date: Jul 4, 2015

Research Interests:
Art, Feminism, and Melancholia

Publication Date: Jul 1, 2015

Research Interests:
Feminist Theory, Art, Feminist Philosophy, Women in Art, Feminism, and 11 moreFeminist Art, Women Artists, Feminist Art History, Feminism and Social Justice, Mieke Bal, British Black Arts, Monica Ross, Feminist Performance Art, Sutapa Biswas, Rosie the Riveter, and Black British Artists

Publication Date: 2008

Research Interests:
Art, Contemporary Art, Women Artists, Artists' Writings, Visual Arts, and 2 morePortrait and Artists Books

Tracey Emin has undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis from a young, unknown artist into the ‘bad girl’ of the Young British Art movement, challenging the complacency of the art establishment in both her work and her life. Today she is arguably the doyenne of the British art scene and attracts more acclaim than controversy. Her work is known by a wide audience, yet rarely receives the critical attention it deserves. Tracey Emin: Art Into Life is the first academic book to examine Emin's artistic practice in nearly 2 decades. Writers from a range of art historical, artistic and curatorial perspectives investigate how Emin’s art, life and celebrity status have become inextricably intertwined. This innovative collection of essays includes the first detailed study of Emin's engagement in her art and writings of her Turkish Cypriot heritage and the first account of her early years as an artist. Emin’s intersectional identity, questions of ageing and sexuality are considered alongside debates issues of autobiography, self-presentation , authenticity and performativity. Attention to key works is accompanied by discussions of the multi-media exchanges of her work and the tensions between art and craft. With its focus on the central themes of Emin’s art and accessible theorization of her creative practice, Tracey Emin: Art into Life will interest a broad readership from scholars and students to Emin's wide fanbase.

Publication Date: May 14, 2020

Research Interests:
Art, Biography, History of Art, Visual Arts, Craft, and 2 moreFine Art and Art World

Publication Date: Dec 6, 2017

Research Interests:
Engineering

Publication Date: Dec 8, 2017

Research Interests:
Art, Jazz, and Musical

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Publication Date: 2018

Publication Name: Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy

Research Interests:
Philosophy, Aesthetics, Performance Studies, Poverty, Political Science, and 15 moreShame Theory, Performance Art, Performance, Feminist Art, Intersectionality and Social Inequality, Feminist Art History, Intersectionality, Shame, Silvan Tomkins, Austerity, Hypatia, Intersectional Feminism, Politics of Austerity, Anti austerity Protests, and feminism and class

Publication Date: Feb 27, 2017

Research Interests:
Art

Although usually associated with so-called ‘fringe’ movements, we have recently witnessed a proliferation of survivalist phenomena both in the margins and mainstream. In 2008 MSNBC reported that ‘in hard times, some flirt with survivalism: Economic Angst has some Americans stockpiling “beans, bullets and Band-Aids”’. A virtual explosion of survivalist film and TV has followed, from The Walking Dead to Bear Grylls’ Running Wild and Mission Survive. With a fully mediatised survivalism as its context, British satirical periodical The Daily Mash recently published an article claiming that: ‘Bear Grylls’ latest challenge is to live in London while earning £12.50 an hour’. While a spoof, the piece places both Grylls and survivalism as entertainment back in the context of the economic crisis and austerity, which in turn sparked the proliferation and popularity of survivalist trends. Furthermore, it juxtaposes survivalism with the often desperate conditions of survival under which a growing number of British people live. While Grylls’ survival skills are performed for our entertainment and are celebrated, those who really must survive in poverty under austerity receive no recognition for their considerable resourcefulness and resilience. So-called ‘poverty porn’ reality shows portray real people struggling for survival while living off benefits (social security) or being perpetually under-employed. The subjects of this reality TV genre are demonised as ‘scroungers’ in media representations and threatened with ever-greater cuts in real life, since ‘poverty porn’ has arguably emerged as an ideological tool that smooths the way for increased austerity, consistently affecting the most vulnerable. While Bear Grylls’ survival in the wild inspires awe, economic survival closer to home makes for an abject spectacle, further deepening the social divide that caused it in the first place. They each constitute different aspects of survivalist media entertainment. This PowerPoint presentation takes The Daily Mash piece as a starting point and explores the role of increased economic and political insecurity and disenfranchisement, the neo-liberal rejection of the social and promotion of individualism, in the expansion and diversification of survivalist phenomena and media. We use images and stills from journalistic representations of the economic crisis, survivalist fictional and reality TV genres, as well as data about the effects of austerity, unemployment, homelessness, urban degeneration and gentrification. We aim to complicate and enrich common conceptions of survivalism and survivalist media with a reflection on poverty and economic survival. Published in InMediaRes: A Media Commons Project (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/), under the theme &#39;Survivalist Media&#39;, December 2015: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2015/11/22/what-bear-grylls-can-t-do-survivalist-mediascapes-austerity-britain

Publication Date: Nov 22, 2015

Research Interests:
Political Science, Austerity, Survivalism, Austerity Measures, Survivalists, and 4 morePolitics of Austerity, Survivalist Entrepreneurs, Bear Grylls, and Survivalist Media

Publication Date: Dec 31, 2006

Research Interests:
History, Unconscious Mind, and Subject Matter

In response to Rozsika Parker’s (2010:xi-xxii) preoccupation with charting continuity and change in both the gendered meanings of craft and the work of women artists employing craft techniques and materials, in this article, I reflect on my experience of curating a retrospective exhibition of crochet and mixed media works by Su Richardson, a participant in the collaborative mail art (1975-1977) and installation project Feministo (various venues, including the ICA, 1977). Superficially, Richardson’s domestic iconography has grown in mainstream popularity, as has the use of craft, yet the political, aesthetic and historical specificity of her oeuvre should not be misrecognised: these self-reflectively home-made objects stir the unconscious of domesticity, femininity and their mutual implication from decidedly feminist perspectives. Following Parker (2010:xxi), I argue that threads of influence and dialogue in textiles informed by feminism are often oblique, broken and unexpectedly tangled. If Richardson’s retrospective aimed to forge links not only between past and contemporary feminisms but also with current DIY aesthetics and countercultural practices, contemporary artists working with textiles mine a wealth of cultural and artistic references, suggesting complex and transgressive webs of kinship. Bronwyn Platten’s quilted homage to Mike Kelley, For more and more love hours (R.I.P. Mike Kelley 1954-2012) (1973-2013), is an example of a work in which such cultural and artistic references are brought to the fore. In it, Platten questions Faith Wilding’s dismissal of his work as an abject reification of ‘bad boy masculinity’ (Wilding 2000:94), to propose feminist and gender-critical alliances across genders and generations.

Publication Date: 2014

Publication Name: Image & Text : a Journal for Design

Research Interests:
Art, Feminism, Femininity, Craft, and Mainstream

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Publication Date: May 4, 2015

Publication Name: Women & performance

Research Interests:
Sociology and Austerity

Publisher: Yale University

Publication Date: Mar 31, 2023

Publication Name: British Art Studies

Research Interests:
Architecture

Publisher: Wiley

Publication Date: 2020

Publication Name: A Companion to Textile Culture

Research Interests:
Gender Studies, Art, and Feminism

Publication Date: 2004

Publication Name: n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, vol. 13: Domestic Politics

Research Interests:
Feminist Art, Women Artists, Mail Art, Feminist Art History, The uncanny, and 3 moreCraft, Monica Ross, and Kate Walker