 typing it. Okay, I'll begin. I think we're ready to begin. Hello and welcome and thank you for joining our second art criticism and the pandemic lunchtime talk. I'm Chris McCormack, Associate Editor at Art Monthly and many of the issues that we discussed yesterday and today are borne out of issues raised in the magazine over the last several issues. Indeed many of the invited speakers have contributed or appeared in the magazine or who I've worked with during residencies and workshops. For those who don't know the magazine, please take time to look it up and support independent publishing by subscriber. I would fair to like to thank the Paul Mellon Center for supporting these talks and Anna Reed who's head of research at the Center for sharing yesterday's talk and events manager Ella Fielding for organizing these events. I propose these talks to the PMC from a shared need to start conversations about writing and the pandemic, but also to look more critically at the discourse surrounding it. I think we're all conscious of not wanting to participate in a discourse of excitement of opportunities that may have arisen around what is disproportionately affecting and killing people of color, those in care homes and the vulnerable in society. Today's talk titled whose body seeks to continue some of yesterday's conversation, analyzing the intersections of ableism, racial injustice and sedimentations of colonial violences and to consider these for more closely from perspectives of representation and visibility, strictes of care, the rights to living and mourning and the damaging consequences of an increasing privatization of health care. The discussion today seeks to analyze critique opposing new paths of resistance. As I say, we have an incredible lineup of speakers today coming from many places, Nios and who is joining from Cajado in Kenya, Robert McRuer who's joining from Bokotar, Lawn Absiccogati and Marina Vishnit, both who are in London and Jade Montserrat who is joining from Scarborough. I'll introduce each in more detail as they give their papers. In terms of structure, which I briefly outlined before, Neon Lawn will speak first followed by discussion, followed by Robert and Marina with Q&A and then Jade, followed by Q&A. So please do send questions using the Q&A box which can be found by clicking at the bottom of the page or by raising your hand and we'll unmute your mic so that you can speak directly to the panel. So this brings me to announce our first speaker, Nios and Zola Musanghi. I'm so pleasure to see you, your powers here, you're here with us. An independent queer feminist whose work life is an art, academia and creative writing. Between 2013 and early 2017, Nios was the Humanities Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Kenya. Before then, Nios had created a doctoral fellowship at the Witt's Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Waters-Rend in Johannesburg. They now work as a maker of things and who also writes about art when they cannot make it. They also develop as a part-time lecturer in gender studies at St. Lawrence University and is currently working on a collection of essays titled Public Sex, Failure and Postcolonial Mediocrity in the Biographical Archive. Neo lives in Queijoto, Kenya, as I say, with their three, my slideship by dog children, Cabello, Ritimi and Loretto. It is my pleasure to announce and introduce Neo, if you may want to start. Thank you, Chris. I'm really excited to be here. I feel slightly unprepared for this but we'll see how it goes. So my conversation today is around something that I'm calling black insistence and I don't think I will speak much about art writing or even art making in this conversation but I want to draw on very general ideas about blackness. So when I submitted this topic, I had many things to say, things that could have counted as brilliant or at least thought through. I realize now it is difficult to speak about blackness and being in the face of something now being called a pandemic. But this difficulty is mostly because of fear. The fear of not only sounding polemic but also the fear of succumbing into native informant over sharing. It is difficult to do thinking work from the place that has come to be known as Africa in this moment. I deliberately use Africa and not Kenya, my specific context because this positioning is important to situate where I speak from, where I was born into and where I live, a place that seems to live in or with pandemics from cholera, HIV, Ebola and poverty, if we think of poverty as a pandemic. Africa is the home of diseased bodies. I don't even see this as an over simplification. To many, this is a tautology but it's worth restating nevertheless. This is one way of making myself and the bodies about which I speak intelligible. In a different context, I probably wouldn't need to do this but we are speaking of a disease. We are speaking about bodies, diseased or likely to be diseased bodies. And as Elaine Spary calls it, the body in pain. Just this week, the South African government was reported to have prepared or at least to have been in the process of preparing approximately 1.5 million graves in Hauteng province alone. This is a mid-increasing COVID-19 statistics across the continent with more than 12,000 deaths registered and with most of these in South Africa as of yesterday. There's something to be said about the digging of graves being seen as government preparedness here. It is both an admission of inevitability but also an indexing to something larger. Bandi Lemasuku, a Hauteng Provisional Official Matter of Faculty says it's a reality that we need to deal with. Masuku is probably right as the numbers ascend, many Africans living on the continent will certainly die. And this is not about pessimism. It is an acknowledgement of the continent's place in the world. A vaccine for COVID-19 will be found but like the HIV vaccine, it may take five years or perhaps even up to 20 for that vaccine to reach and become accessible to Africa's 1.3 billion people. By then, other pandemics will have broken out and Africa will be dealing with not only HIV and SARS-2 and its many mutations but our range of other complications. The reasons for these are obvious. Pandemics, history has shown us, become one of many sites that encapsulates the regulation of biomedicine through the vicissitudes of social normatives. Like what's the case with HIV AIDS in the late 1990s and entirely part of the last decade, William Sparling reports and I quote, some global health officials argued that those living in poverty were not literate enough to follow the prescribed regimen of treatment for taking ARB medication. This racist argument in turn, Sparling continues, was appropriated by Western pharmaceutical companies as a rationale for not lowering the cost of the drugs, arguing that a failure to take the drugs responsibly could lead to drug-resistant strains of HIV. I do not want to dwell on the racism of biomedicine knowledge here but it is important to think in the larger frame of these histories as a way through which black African bodies continue to be not only lost in the hierarchy of bodily cartography but also as disposable as not yet quite human as undeserving. If they do not die of COVID-19 and Mars, they will die of some other specifically African problem anyway. And if they are not dying of COVID-19 as fast as expected, Western journalists implore everyone else quite suggestively to wonder why African countries are poor and African governments cannot be trusted fast enough to save lives. Too many on the continent or it's probably me and a few others, COVID-19 has the ill feeling of what and what we've been here before or even what but we live here. But I want to go back to the idea of the human and perhaps dwell on it for the rest of this talk. In a different talk this week I was exploring the double negation that posts many black people across the world as neither human nor citizen and not in the sense of battle as a recognizability but as accepted subjects of the state that can be eliminated by the police and other agents at will. In Kenya for instance with the ongoing curfew and lockdown trade-off as it is the fear of being beaten or killed by the police. This is happening at a time when blackness seems to have garnered currency and entered the lexicon of the human in light of the Black Lives Matter movement as though blackness as it always lived in this combustible rage. We were never human and I use we strategically here we have never fully been able to participate in sociality of what has come to be known as the human. The human evolution, the human in human rights idea say and indeed the human in human beings. We know this because as Sadia Hartman reminds us in sense of subjugation the black body is in ontological opposition to the very definition of humanity around which human rights civil society or even the rule of law for example are defined. Of course many black scholars have found this black person who'd vis-a-vis black interpolation framing pessimistic and even at times unuseful in the extreme. Indeed this framework is seen as overly over emphasizing the antagonism between blackness and humanity to the point that it reduces black subjectivity to a death-driven non-being as Fred Mountain wants to argue. I can imagine the possibility that possibly a huge number of people here would agree with this critique and that's understandable as black subjecthood seems to be simply a by-product of racial slavery and black agency when or if at all possible is inescapably reduced to the replication of the social structure. The Brazilian Scholar-Gemian Parahalves tells us now this ontological position of blackness as Antoni Antoni Antonimus to humanity. Fred Martin has argued it works in a negative register and ends up denying black subjectivity and rafying black suffering in its place. Martin suggests that what he calls the Parahontological Disruption of the Racial Scripts. But then what is to be done with the historical considerations of negation perhaps this is how to conveniently use severe wind up for the territory. And I'm suggesting something here I'm suggesting that we post black insistence as a way of black being as a way to establish Olajewan has called it to think blackly to think blackly as a testimony against governments as a testimony of black people against police and individuals who strike laws against black bodies and communities in economic and truly corporeal terms. I'm calling for a sightedness that makes black living and living well black possible now and beyond. And I want to conclude this very unfinished thoughts with one a line from June Judan's poem a poem for Nana and June Judan asks what will we do when there's nobody left to kill. Thank you. Thank you so much, Naio, for that amazing discussion of life in Africa and your position in there. I will move on to Lan before we have a more open discussion between the two papers. Lan if you could show your screen and we'll then have a group discussion about both papers. Sure. Thank you to Chris for inviting me and Paul Mellon Center for hosting and to Naio for that really interesting talk. I'm going to talk about painting, recent painting and particularly figuration and the relationship of this to questions around the body and the sort of politics of the body now. Before I share my screen I just sort of wanted to frame how I'm approaching this which is through the the way in which over the last I would say maybe two or three years the majority of painting that I've engaged with and seen both in galleries or recent painting I should say as well as at work on behalf of the work that students at the Slade where I work making seems to be dominated by figurative painting which obviously stands in some kind of contrast to the way in which painting developed at least in you know the sort of dominant centers of the art world through much of the 20th century after the beginnings of modernism and I want to think about this through how some of the criticisms of recent abstraction have revolved around this category of zombie formalism which was put forth by the critic Walter Robinson where he saw this category of zombie formalism as kind of marking the last gasp of abstraction as a kind of viable or interesting in and of itself way of making work where abstraction in the form of zombie formalism becomes merely decoration for corporate lobbies. Now that figurative painting has become so ubiquitous in the way that it has in recent years my friend Lizzie sent me an article yesterday by the critic Alex Greenberg which is titled something like zombie figuration so using the same category to describe the trend and its popularity with curators collectors and artists so with zombie obviously standing here in a kind of metaphoric way for something that is sort of ubiquitous and undead I would really like to have sort of framed this a little bit more but in a kind of related to some of the questions about what a zombie body is in relation to a pandemic and the undead but I'm just taking up this category to think through what that idea of zombie figuration might mean and particularly some of the limits of that idea that I feel instinctively in terms of the fact that recent figurative practice seems particularly concerned with questions around representation, race, gender and sexuality in a way which instinctively makes me feel it's less hospitable to this zombification or this kind of banal ubiquity that we would associate with zombie formalism. So I want to do this through thinking about some paintings that I saw this year before the lockdown which I will run through now so I'm just going to start the share screen thing and hopefully everyone can see my slides now. So this is Kerry James Marshall's painting part of a series that he made which centre on themes of black romance and take their form from the Fragonard painting The Swing. So if this Fragonard painting marks the kind of like apotheosis of a French aristocratic like Rococo frivolry, Marshall reframes it to include symbols around black militancy and resistance so I don't know I don't know how I can sort of point out but hopefully you can see the fist on top of the afro comb in the back and in other paintings within this series there's other sorts of symbols that reference that history. So I saw this at the Art Institute of Chicago and on that same visit I also saw Yatacotta's a bar at number five which I'm sorry this is a very poor slide I now realise but this painting riffs off Mane's very famous bar at the Foilier-Bergère. So in the case of both Cutter and Kerry James Marshall they are engaging in a kind of figurative painting to refer back to the history of painting. Also in February in New York I saw Jordan Castile's show at the New Museum which engages with the history of figurative painting particularly within modernism through her engagement with forms of realism. Many of her paintings made me think about Alice Neal's work and Charles White's work so something like Alice Neal's portraits that she made in Spanish Harlem in the 50s or in relation to this painting by Jordan Castile of a nail technician at work. I was thinking about some of Charles White's paintings from the 50s portraits of workers such as this one and in that sort of representing people at work it seems to resonate with some of the historical preoccupations with realism. This painting is one I've thought about quite a lot in the last couple of weeks as I've followed some discussion mainly online on behalf of like on Instagram seeing kind of nail technicians complaining about the fact or complaining is the wrong way to put it but criticising the fact that the government in the UK has you know obviously opened up bars and restaurants and so on from the lockdown now but the beauty industry remains kind of shut down for the minute aside from hairdressers and many of these women have been pointing at the fact that this has a kind of racist and sexist undercurrent to it in that the beauty industry is mainly staffed by and managed owned by women of colour in the UK. So thinking through these portraits by Jordan Castile as engaged with some of the principles of realism and the idea of the portrait in particular as having a kind of humanising device. So Alice Neill described paintings like these as part of what she called a proletarian portrait gallery and the aim of them being to kind of represent subjects that were up to that point largely excluded from the history of western painting and in some ways I would see Castile's painting as continuing in that tradition. Also earlier this year I saw Nicole Eisenman's painting Brooklyn Beergarten at the White Chapel radical figures show which in its own sort of capacity raised questions about what does the word radical mean in relation to painting like this or figurative painting what does radical mean in relation to politics when it's situated here or in relation to aesthetics. But as much as Castile engages I think with histories of realism Eisenman is also engaged in histories of 20th century figurative painting particularly stuff around Noia Saklokite something like this by Otto Dietz comes to mind. So in making these references towards how these painters are engaged with the history of figurative painting and modernism it's not to suggest that these works are less or derivative in any way but rather to think about how these artists engage in legacies of paintings which mark the history of modernism and what that might mean in relation to the idea of zombie figuration. So rather than thinking about these paintings or the intention of the painters are somehow undead I would rather suggest that the zombie quality arises in relation to the history of modernism so it's more the history that this work chooses to engage that remains undead and in particular the modes of exclusion which were foundational to that history of modernism. I now want to come on to works that have kind of intrigued me for better or worse that seem less self-consciously engaged with history or the canon and firstly I would like to come to Noah Davis's paintings whose work I saw all over Instagram which raises other questions about how we're looking at painting during a pandemic and while I thought they looked interesting on the screen I didn't quite get it until seeing them in person where his show at David's Furner in New York really knocked me out particularly because these paintings I don't know exactly what to relate them to in terms of a history of figurative painting if anything what they reminded me of was more recent film or television they made me think about Jordan Peel's movies us or get out in terms of a kind of black gothic or black horror aesthetic and also Donald Glover's TV show Atlanta for the way that they mixed domesticity familial relations with a kind of edge of risk or danger but I think in a totally different way to how that kind of uncanny domesticity might have been executed within surrealism and these paintings are still works that I'm thinking about a lot and trying to figure out what they're doing. Similarly, Hamishie Forrest's show at Arcadia Missa I think I saw this at the end of March I really liked this painting a lot for the way in which it takes up quite an odd but unlikely like a kind of unlikely scene of a moment in a vets of this dog having some kind of I don't know procedure but there's something about the caption and the way it's framed that seems filtered very much through a screen through Instagram the kind of focus on the animal but the animal here is kind of pathetic or damaged and yeah so as much as I feel like I don't know how to think about Noah Davis's work in relation to the history of sort of tropes within modernist figurative painting Hamishie Forrest's work also seems to me like completely unusual and interesting. Finally, I wanted to come on to work that to me seems a little bit closer to how I would understand a zombie figuration which also raises questions about sort of subject hood and bodies and that is through the work of TM Davy so he's a painter based in New York and while some of the sort of painterly techniques that we see here seem close to Forrest painting Forrest's painting is acrylic this is gouache and pastel so they're both using materials that in some way are like less valuable than say oil painting in the in terms of the history of painting and while this is of course also a painting of a dog I don't really know what this is other than just a painting of a dog whereas the Hamishie Forra painting seems much more kind of intriguing but Davy's work has more than these this this sort of paintings of dogs or animals has become mainly known for his portrayals of romance gay romance and life on fire island and this of course comes back to the question of recognition figuration subjectivity that that is also running through much of the other work that I have shown today in a recent article by Barry Schwabsky which is called what's wrong with the new figurative painting he has an aside about gay marriage and some of these paintings by Davy as well as other artists and is thinking about this in terms of like what painting demands or representation demands in terms of sort of asking for a form of recognition and how we could think about that alongside something like gay marriage and this idea of recognition and representation in the eyes of the law of course raises then questions about what the sort of overwhelming earnestness as I would see it in Davy's paintings it excludes so the critic Shiv Katetcha wrote the following about Davy's paintings of scenes from fire island saying this and I'll just quote him he says despite my desires I cannot shake the feeling that the cruisey fantasies of isolation from New York City from the straight world that enable a sense of queer freedom rely on quiet and unshakable forms of racial exclusion is the anonymity of cruising in the dunes or woods or on the island's elevated gangways just another kind of ethnic erasure I can never be anonymous in pines it's predominant whiteness forbids it so thinking about that while I think like considering the sort of range of figurative painting practices that we see today it would be completely absurd to pose it in the terms that it was sometimes posed within the history of the 20th century and modernism as like incipiently regressive especially when abstraction has now become the default mode of art for corporate lobbies the world over there are of course many different registers here and at a time where bodies and visibility is a portraiture and representation is profoundly uneven and riddled with violence it seems worse thinking through some of these contradictions or differences in putting these sorts together very quickly this morning and I'm sorry if it's a little bit rushed what I'm saying I kept thinking about this quote from Philip Guston I think it's from sort of mid 70s where he said I see the studio as a court the act of painting is like a trial where all the roles are lived by one person it's as if the painting has to prove its right to exist this quote I think dates after Philip Guston's sort of scandalous return to figuration which he was heavily criticized within the New York art world in the early 70s but it's of course worth noting that when he returned to making figurative work for Guston it was related to the political exigencies of the moment so in 1971 he starts making his kind of hideous cartoons of Richard Nixon the court is of course an odd metaphor to justify the existence of the painting which as we know it the court remains a space of relentless injustice while it claims to always be a space of justice but nevertheless the idea of why an artwork needs to exist other than to provide decoration for rich people's homes remains a question I think to explore around this rise of figuration and let's have a look at that you stop sharing thanks Lon and that contribution I think it really opens up the many parallel worlds that we are living through I think compared to Naio's text and the conversation if Naio can open up the camera again and we can have a conversation there's Naio still there everyone great um Naio I will briefly begin I think you mentioned the subject this idea of thinking blackly and I think in a way that seemed to me like one point where we could actually maybe engage with your conversation in a broader point I mean I think the discussion of you know it's incredible to describe the situation of this expectation of death and these digging of graves but can we talk a little bit about this idea maybe thinking blackly in relationship to that and maybe what that proposes in some way if that can be even thought about um thanks Chris I think at the risk of sounding very the fittest um and I think a lot of black scholars especially now in this moment have come to a conclusion that perhaps blackness was not going to ever be human right historically and in this moment that there's this insistence to be included and what that does it creates a conversation around diversity that becomes something to do with the politics of representation right um and I think to think blackly for me as as as uh Sidya Hatman and Sylvia Winter as so many other black women I've said is to actually think from a place of a care ethic right it's to speak from where I am standing rather than do what Toni Morrison as one does against like rather than speak back rather than insist on being included in this human community to actually start figuring out ways of surviving right from from here and from within that blackness and this is not us for black exceptionalism I think what I'm thinking through is how else can we live right rather than spending a lot of energy fighting to be part of a community that doesn't consider us part of that community if that makes sense completely no I don't think it very much does make sense I wondered if anyone else had thoughts here on any of Naio's conversational point that were raised I can see I don't think we have any questions just a bit long raising some of the subjects you're describing this idea of almost this undead and this kind of I guess this return of the modernist frame underpins the practices of many present artists it seems to me this uneasy history that keeps reappearing and won't go away and is it in a sense do you think these artists are trying to certainly not re-energize it but in a sense dissolve it or what is the what is the process behind this re-engagement with this narratives or these histories thanks Chris um I think uh well I think it's I don't have like one answer to that but I think in relation to what Naio just said and to try and sort of make a link with with their presentation and and what I've just said I think this question of like representation or recognition is one that interests me a lot and probably partly why for me the the Noah Davis paintings out of the work that I showed seemed most intriguing because they seemed to operate beyond uh although like my association with them actually goes to sort of film and television in some way or even music it goes to other sorts of cultural form so it's not like they're they're completely outside of a framework of thinking about culture um I find I find the way in which they seem to like elude or evade some of these more familiar histories of modernism really interesting in terms of some of the problems about portraiture and the history of portraiture and even the the impulse you know within Neil's painting or as I would see it in in some of Jordan Castile's painting that in being about representation and and recognition like how is that linked with this this point that Naio has made about um the the sort of problems around a politics of inclusion I guess and and where where that leaves us when the kinds of frames that you're you know seeking to humanize the subject in relation to are like founded upon de de a dehumanization which yeah so so that's I suppose how I would respond to that and Naio I wanted to ask might seem if this is a question or not relevant but what do you feel how have artists responded to the situation and what's your observations of certain artists that you know what's the conversation been for you about this subject or the present moment um I think so I don't have very complete like a complete frame of thinking through this but I think from experience as particularly in Kenya where a lot of visual artists seem to work in what is known as the gig economy I think one of the implications of COVID-19 is that people just don't have work right or that people don't have money and it seems like we've we've gone to a survival mode where for instance the Kenyan government is is trying to put up some money as COVID relief for artists but then what that means is that artists are expected to produce work that directly relates to COVID-19 and I think a lot of us know that that's not how creative energies work you don't summon them to speak to a particular thing because people are trying to figure out ways of surviving there are a lot of people in the last actually in the last two weeks who have been evicted by their landlords just because they can't afford to have rent and these artists who do not have galleries artists who rely on you know kind of a pseudo commissioning of work to survive so it's the situation at the moment and I think this is a feeling that is shared a lot in the country at the moment is that it's not COVID-19 itself that is messy it is the implications of of the of COVID-19 in the economy it is the implications of coronavirus for even social movement and mobility that is disturbing completely and as you say it's I think for me it is this image of Africa as you said as this diseased you know corpus in a sense and in a way I feel that your argument is kind of let's change that or not change but to kind of move that argument away as you said to think blackly um because that seemed a fair comment yeah uh anyone else have any thoughts about Naio's text or Lawn's text what am I saying no it's because I've got a question in the Q&A box from Julia um it might be good to ask Julia Smith should I read that thank you for a very rich prompt Naio I was wondering if you could say a bit more about what it might mean from your perspective to think blackly and there's a specific context of the coronavirus pandemic so I guess it's something that you've in part already addressed but yeah I think I don't know Julia I was just responding in the chat box um to your question but I do not have at the moment um a response I do not have a response to this particularly because to be honest it's very difficult to think with coronavirus at the moment because in the in the moment of it right and uh the fact that the numbers have gone so high on the continent it's it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to think as it happens right and I think to think blackly in the specific context is to maybe perhaps and perhaps this is a conversation that black people themselves would have to have and black Africans in this case to have amongst themselves to figure out whether they're alternative ways of mitigating the pandemic in terms of just um whether it's indigenous knowledges whatever it is that resources that are available to them to tap into them in ways that sustain life um rather than so for instance we know for sure that governments are not going to be what saves our lives because African governments are what they are um and we do not expect that but also to think about how in the context of this pandemic there people have always been lower in the hierarchy in the specific countries so trans bodies uh bodies with disabilities are always going to the pandemic is going to affect them a lot more than the general population so there's something to be said about trying to reorganize society and maybe that's overly ambitious to reorganize society so that everyone is is saved but in very I don't want to use inherent but in ways that come from unknowing that is embedded in in blackness quickly just to follow up I would want to add something about the way in which gender roles actually in Laan you picked up on the way in which women's work effectively has been most affected through the pandemic and the process of the pandemic and that's something that you picked up on and also I see that Lizzie Homishon has also posted a question to you Laan she says I wonder if you've been thinking about a state as a painting in relation to the subject that the artist and the painting's value is being determined by an emphasis on the artist's labor she's thinking here is about Graves argument here at high price as well as how the painting circulates paintings reliance on the museum for its value as predicated on exclusivity and the rare chance and now more than previously a viewing of painting in person thank you Lizzie I think I haven't thought I mean I'm not totally convinced by the arguments about artist's labor and from what I know of like how Isabella grove like proposes those in terms of like how she understands labor but the thing that in terms of subjectivity I guess I've been thinking about this like particularly with someone like with the TM Davey paintings like I don't have another example right now but but how they sort of represent certain like characters or figures or like summon up an idea of a scene and how that relates to to sort of the presentation of certain subject positions online or how kind of clout or like value not in a kind of like strict sense but I mean like a sort of social value gets accredited to to certain people so I don't think I'd see it so much in terms of in thinking about the status of painting in relation to the subjectivity of the artist I think I'm I'm being thinking about it more in terms of like how the persona of the artist contributes to the value or presence of of an artwork perhaps I mean this is nothing new in some ways but it seems sort of accelerated through the way in which things circulate online and get linked into certain sorts of scenes or personalities in a way that's like much more accessible to everybody rather than how it would have been in the past where you would have maybe had to I don't know like read a certain magazine or go to a certain place but this is now very very visible so that's more how I've thought about it but yeah should I answer the other question that came in the Q&A as well it's quickly if you could answer that that would be okay so how seriously should we take it I don't know I mean it's I think it's mainly it's like a piece of rhetoric and I don't in the same way that I don't you know I'm kind of not so clear on how useful even zombie formalism was as a term beyond a sort of rhetorical device but it for me it's useful in terms of thinking that if there's a sort of mainstream critical rhetoric that's reached the point where zombie figuration gets deployed as a term then it then it highlights the the real dominance of figurative painting within the art world so so it's more useful as a sort of symptomatic thing than actually a serious concept for me right now but I had I had a question for Neha which can I ask that now um which was around like whether in terms of what you've been thinking about uh I feel it's towards problems um that emerge you know the problems that dominate within the left or political struggles around a lack of internationalism that um particularly within anglophone context but other contexts that there's there's a diminishing of internationalist thinking in terms of political struggle and um I wonder if you have any thoughts on that or the sort of viability of that now in relation to what you're thinking about whether it's something you think might shift is it even something that would be useful or those sorts of questions um so I don't know about diminishing internationalism but I think just as you are speaking now one of the things that I've realized is that with airports closed we are stuck here with each other right uh so the country that I come from from Kenya we rely pretty much on tourism so uh I live in the Nairobi national park and there are lions roaming around and I've been wondering about poor lions they're not tourists to see them right just as the natives in our land and that means in terms of our Kenya's GDP there's not going to be much coming in right for this year and that has implications for the way that I mean we don't have a government that it's pretty interested in social welfare but we have elections coming up and that means there won't be much campaign money but then I thought so if airports are locked how are we surviving right and I'm not calling for normalizing of this I'm not calling for seeing this as disturbingly quote-unquote as the new normal but maybe this is a time in which we we might have the strategists within this period to think of oh what's working and what do we keep for us to survive yeah um completely Naio and um thanks again for both of your contributions there um and we'll move on in the interest of time to our next two speakers they're going to be Robert McRua and Marina Vishmit we'll start with Marina if we may um Marina is a writer editor and educator her work has appeared in South Atlantic quarterly ephemera after all journal of a cultural economy and Australian feminist studies and radical philosophy amongst many others as well as a number of edited volumes she is the co-author of reproducing autonomy and the author of speculation as a mode of projection forms of value subjectivity in art and capital she is one of the organizers of the Center for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths and a member of the Marxism in Culture Collective and is also part of Boomsbury academics board for its new perspectives on critical theory of society series Marina if i could welcome you to deliver your paper any thanks hey uh thank you uh Chris and everyone at the Paul Mellon Center and all the um other speakers and the two kind of incredibly compelling fascinating talks that we've just heard um hard to follow but i'll try um so um a bit like Naio said at the beginning of their talk i'm not going to be speaking very specifically about art at least not until the end of the talk in a kind of glancing way so it's going to be kind of more um i guess a more general reading of certain kinds of tendencies we've observed particularly during the time of the pandemic but also before and around it so i guess one way i could start is with the way the experience of the pandemic has in my observation generalized what used to be a certain understanding of biopolitics which was perhaps common sense in certain academic activists and critical domains but less so in a broader discursive or even effective context and what i mean by that is this notion of what happens to the individual or biological body as systemic as institutional as connected to and engendered by not just the evident disciplinary and governance infrastructures of gender race sexuality ability legal status and so forth that we are perhaps familiar with from the fecotean paradigm but also to the perhaps more conventionally materialist or political economic considerations which are not at all separate or detached from the above ones of global food production systems logistics networks the shredding of social safety nets and public health and so forth so the pandemic and the management of the pandemic or the failure of that management made these connections very obvious and implacable very hard to ignore basically from the moment you could say from the moment that panic buying began or began to be sort of visible in the media before you even had to look for any critical research or analysis on what was going on regarding the long-term background or the incredibly differential and socially embedded horrific impacts of the pandemic and again as neo noted the management of the pandemic and its economic and social fallouts which again really just follows the existing distribution of life chances and protection in societies whose every aspect of social reproduction was defined by extreme and normalized violence against black people people of color migrants women and trans people as well as men whose class position lethally combined with their allocation to the first two groups so on the one hand it feels like the pandemic has definitely revealed the extent to which individual bodily vulnerability to harm and risk is socially produced and socially institutionalized on the other hand or has revealed something that was obvious to many on the wrong end of those harms and risks on the other hand there have continued to be discourses around the greater vulnerability of black and brown people to the virus which attempt to locate this vulnerability in some extra or surplus biological dimension or some specific racialized susceptibility some x-factor which seems quite problematic on a lot of levels given the kind of alibi this would provide for the neglect to sadism spectrum that white racism authorizes and practices through public and private mechanisms to an alibi enabling that to be written off as the peculiarity of or written on particular bodies there's clearly been a lot of debate about this with the complexity that what seems on the face of it to be a completely reactionary and spurious suggestion can probably not be dismissed out of hand by those without the relevant biomedical knowledge which if it does make any useful discoveries can have life-saving consequences for workers and patients but it does seem doubtful given what we know about the validity of race as a biological marker at the same time there's of course a lot of emphasis on individual responsibility in some states including us and uk for the management of a pandemic which is at the very least a collective action problem as sociologists would say given the individual is the naturalized unit of life social relations and human reason in neoliberal ideology of humanity as such in a more historical and racialized register this is perhaps another way that the social and the biological are intertwined in a way that disavows the collective and the social in the systemic prioritization of the economic which is exactly the systemic dimension that the emphasis on individual choice and judgment disguises unless it's an issue of universal provision of vouchers to go to restaurants which seems like some kind of New Yorker cartoon on what Tories think of when they hear the term ubi but the slippage between the vulnerability as a social and biological category and experience here now brings me to say a little bit about my recent research which i'm publishing in a couple of places soon on how this suddenly common sense status of the critical trope of biopolitics has been taken up on the left including in contemporary art or in culture more generally so here i'm thinking in a more topical way of texts discussing this term left biopolitics that have been circulating in the last couple of months such as by the Althusserian Marxist philosopher Panayoti Satiris which basically translates some of the feminist arguments around self-determined social reproduction and the political implications of the networks of mutual aid that were so active during lockdown in some parts of Europe and the U.S. also here into this Fikotian vocabulary of biopolitics and harken back as well to the breakfast programs and other social betterment and collective self-provision initiatives run by liberation movements in the 20th century such as the Black Panthers to take the best known example but i'm also thinking of the term two vocabulary per se of bodies which pervades activist and cultural discourse from art and curatorial theory such as the parliament of bodies in 2017's documentary is one of the early and most visible examples to the political vocabularies of the anti-racist queer and feminist left so this is something i try to analyze in the work i was just referring to i mean my work and try and tease out some dimensions of what it could mean or how it could mean culturally and politically so in some ways it's part of a turn to affect to the somatic as the ground of political legibility and political possibility echoing in some ways new materialist and object-oriented discussions in the academy in the determination to go beyond linguistic symbolic and even the dominance of psychoanalytic narratives that privileged the kind of split subject structured famously in Lacan's terms like a language in in its unconscious and its desires in this sense the discourse of bodies tries to override the consumerist individualism that is the default of conceiving of the person so to speak in the abstract in contemporary capitalist societies at the same time i would suggest that there's an ambiguity there because the individual thus conceived and normalized is not so much a linguistic or a rational individual necessarily although the rational choice theory of markets continues to be very much in effect in policy design and politics neoliberal politics but then of course so does behavioral economics and all the disciplines and popular notions of the person as a bundle of quantifiable effects and data frequently communicated by and elicited from their bodies as with Fitbits and other such self-quantifying devices so my question that i guess in this super concise formulations here my question is really whether the self-proprietorial self-owning individual that is the model of the neoliberal human the consumer can and perhaps less benign definitions of course can be avoided politically or ideologically whether we actually do get to a more collective and connected place through the use of the language of bodies or whether that is trying to get to a level of concreteness that perhaps sidesteps the powerful forces of social abstraction that turn us into isolated helpless suffering bodies in the eyes of capital in the state at the hands of capital in the state just as the pandemic has made so blind and unclear so that's that's it for me thanks many thanks marina for the incisive commentary about the current moment i think we have lots to talk about there but i'll move on to robert and i'll just introduce robert for our audience robert macrure is professor of english at george washington university where he teaches disability studies queer theory and critical theory he was the author most recently a cryptimes disability globalization and resistance for nyu press in 2018 which focuses on the uk and examines the ways in which disability is an under theorized component of a global austerity politics he's also author of the crypt theory cultural signs of queerness and disability which was published in 2006 as well as numerous other books and articles including with anna malo he's co-editor of sex and disability which published by juke in 2012 and with david bolt the general co-editor of a six-volume series a cultural history of disability which comes with bloomsbury this year and it's a volume which covers antiquity to the modern age robert you join us from bogey tart delighted to have you with us and also very much looking forward to seeing this book that's coming out if you could begin your paper thanks all right hola gracias a todos y todas chris and everyone i'm going to share my screen and then begin so hopefully this will work share then okay um i i like my title for these brief remarks quite a bit disability art i'm locked down and hopefully fits well for the theme of our conversation today which is whose body um but let me say at the outset that there's no way that i can live up to the promise of the title because it's too soon to know all the amazing ways in which disability art on the current lockdown is being generated my my conclusion today will basically just list some of that amazing art for you my opening slide here is showing a virtual meeting being hosted by dance new york city last month as part of their artists are necessary workers series and just quickly clockwise from upper left you see christopher um pes verde nunyes who is a visually impaired dancer queer costarican immigrant to new york city pittsburgh based artist dust dustin gibson who is an activist and artist working at the intersections of disability race and class um alice shepherd who i would say is one of the most important dancers in the united states today you can find her on instagram with uh the name wheelchair dancer brandon who is the asl interpreter for the event and simi linton author of my body politic and producer and uh subject of the disability documentary invitation to dance the theme of this session was disability um the theme of the session session was disability justice as the vanguard of recovery thinking and there was a lot of debate during it about whether recovery rejuvenation reinvention um or other words would be the most appropriate yesterday the word that was being debated was resetting especially resonating with barbers talk but my title today disability art on lockdown also arguably has a double valence as it's meant to gesture to the ways in which disability and art have been increasingly on lockdown uh even before the current crisis that we are living through facing massive cuts from governments everywhere my work on disability and art in uh both in my most recent book and in the one that is germany now has been pivoting toward disability justice in latin america my recent book pictured here uh as as chris has suggested has read the last decade of global emergency as what i have termed crypt times my argument has been that in our moment disability is a central but under theorized component of a global austerity politics um and aca's talk yesterday actually was quite interesting in this regard it's so ironic that this ongoing invisibilization of disability uh is happening now in the middle of an actual health pandemic i'll assume uh especially with an audience largely based in the uk that i don't need to really gloss austerity as a key word you'll see something almost every week at the moment suggesting that austerity is done but this crisis i would say is showing us nothing if not how deeply entrenched it already was and that's regardless of what porous johnson and others might say about the future with millions of people in the united states losing their health care because of the crisis with disabled children and seniors doing online fundraisers for the nhs in the uk because of how the nhs has been open to business models and on and on my book focused both on very particular locations where such an austerity agenda was quickly imposed following the global financial crisis of 2008 and on locations where that logic was already deeply sedimented crypt times thus first centers specifically on the particularly punishing austerity regime in one location the regime that has been in place in the uk for a decade this slide shows the disability artist liz crow a performance piece that she did on the banks of the tems called figures where she was using sculptures to represent lies in the uk lived at the sharp edge of austerity but the book also spins out to a range of other locations considering the ways in which disabled and crip queer feminist artists and activists creatively resist a logic of austerity so from here i'm putting before you a slide uh that is the work of libya radwanski who is a mexico city-based photographer this is part of a global project that was called el museo de los despasados the museum of the displaced which drew attention to the processes of displacement and whose body is displaced crypt times the phrase is thus also a multivalent phrase pointing towards hard times bleak times precarity and suffering but also towards vibrant cultural production and activists and artistic resistance that has emerged across borders out of or in excess of a logic of austerity and gesturing thus towards generative collective forms of disabled thought what mary lisa johnson and i have called crepistemologies and if you were here yesterday rihanna's talk also was gesturing towards the need for different sorts of epistemologies on lockdown we really need such crepistemologies more than ever and indeed many disabled people already had these skills to teach non-disabled people as one immune compromised an autistic student of mine said back in march as instruction went online i already live in a world whose dangerous i have learned to be wary of and in which i have developed alternative and collective forms of communication all of us need these disabled or crepe ways of knowing again this really resonates with aca's presentation yesterday the book also put forward a repeated double move that i think has relevance for the time of coronavirus and disability art on lockdown it's a double move whereby neoliberalism spectacularizes disability and this is a photo op of course from the most watched paralympics in history the 2012 london paralympics so the move looked at how neoliberalism the book looked at how neoliberalism spectacularizes disability in ways that obscure or actively cover over the actual suffering of disabled lives in a given location so at the time of this particular photo op outside the stadium disabled activists were protesting the fact that atos one of the sponsors of the paralympics were they were protesting the fact that the company was finding thousands of disabled people in the uk fit to work quote-unquote and thus ineligible for benefits i've been thinking in this context a lot about brazil which is still imagining one of the most socially regressive austerity regimes in the world leading to a horrible neglect and loss of services alongside as in many other places the possibility of forced institution institutionalization in this context which already spectacularized some disability identities most notably over the past decade during the world cup and again during the paralympics in this context jair bolsano has used his own disabilities first acquired during the presidential campaign when he was stabbed he's here pictured in the hospital overcoming disability these disabilities have been used to cover over again the bleak situation for disabled people in the country it remains to be seen of course how his own covet diagnosis will play into the double mood that i am tracing so i'm interested in what disability justice looks like in this moment of danger particularly in latin america it's difficult to talk about disability justice thoroughly in the time that i have but i will note that it is a concept developed in the united states by disabled people of color such as patty bern leary mooy more and others largely members of the dance troupe sins invalid and i'm putting a slide before you have sins invalid performers nip bianco and antoine hunter the concept of disability justice is meant to move beyond mere inclusion so think here again of the paralympics photo op and beyond a mere right space bottle it centers the work and leadership of disabled people of color and immigrants it thus crosses borders it is intersectional and it is actively anti-capitalist given capitalism's potential to domesticate some disabled lives and debilitate others my sense as i get my new project off the ground is that the project of disability justice is thriving in and around latin america but that it is simultaneously everywhere embattled brazil is just one location where disability cuts and cuts to the arts have been draconian and have worked in tandem but where and how can we see in conclusion this disability justice working on lockdown in our moment so the members of sins invalid themselves continue to generate critical work especially in the context of the black lives matter moment with libra more in particular drawing attention to how police violence often targets particularly disabled people of color in this context you can think of how i can't breathe is actually a statement that is a disability statement that attests to how often police violence is directed against disabled people of color in mexico city teatro ciego the theater of the blind is a dance troupe that has gone online during coronavirus taking their vision of different sensory perceptions and dance to a new medium and also offering not just dance but comedy during a time of coronavirus with their performance los ciegos también blind people also cry christopher un pez vierde un pez vierde nunyes who i talked about in the beginning part of the round table that i opened with he's pictured here on the screen both before and after lockdown was generating alternative forms of movement and perception but also in a way that in his art works to center queer and immigrant including undocumented lives and movement um finally the last example that i'll put before you uh estella laponi is a salpalo-based artist who has put forward online encounters between her body and a guitar such as in the recent selfish camera born to be on live which is pictured for you here the performance here is born out of the artist's perception of the need to reinvent her artistic work on COVID-19's time her gaze as a dancer and performer has turned quite a lot to the to the frame of the screen to the perspectives in space and to the disconcerting and dizzy movement of the selfie camera due to the portability of the cell phone she carried out some experiments at home here which culminated in selfish camera in collaboration with guitarist and musician larina marini like nunyes the pony too offers provocative and necessary ways of navigating the world otherwise in the brazilian context however she has found it difficult to place her work during lockdown these are just a few examples of many artists offering in this moment of emergency other ways of perceiving and knowing essential workers who are deeply engaged in disability justice and in imagining and inventing the world that might come next huge thanks robert uh for covering both the uk and south american perspective that was very interesting to see both sides of that and kind of try and pick apart i'll think through those two different cultures and histories um i see we have one question already hearing you oh are you not can anyone else hear me yeah can you hear me now yeah uh julia smith asks marina um thank you for an incredibly perceptive overview do you see any political opening slash possibilities at all in the effect orientated landscape you've met i'm just getting thoughts to that um yeah um i mean i guess affect was part of the landscape i was kind of thinking about how affect and the focus on bodies both mark a particular kind of tendency in the way we think of ourselves as political subjects or as political collectives and i guess i wanted to really quickly kind of sketch out what i saw as the kind of ambiguities of that both kind of conceptually and politically i would say the possibilities are maybe precisely in the sense that we see our bodies as these kinds of both kind of spaces where kind of larger systemic and infrastructural effects happen um oh um sorry um and also yeah i guess as produced by those systems and not kind of prior or sort of more like prior or authentic to those systems but produced through those systems which then experience them as part of our own kind of personal and physical experience so i think the whole kind of coverage and analysis analysis different kinds of analyses from journalistic to theoretical to activist and kind of the movements of course that actually have come up which are centering life as a political problem life as a systemic political differential structural problem i think that is the kind of hopeful or optimistic aspect as opposed to kind of feeling isolated vulnerable weak exposed body so i think both the kind of fact of the pandemic its management and also the recent movements the movement for black lives are kind of very much bringing the body back into as a kind of collective political actor so i would say again in practice in praxis rather than as a ground of testimony experience kind of isolation the that's where i see the kind of um positive dimensions of what we are exposed to understanding as well as what we're exposed to understanding as well as what we're exposed to with the current movements but also with the sweep and kind of scale of sorry with the with the pandemic its management and the sweep and scale of the movements that have recently and the uprisings that have recently started to research after kind of being minimized for a while now i could see you were now i could see you were sort of uh engaging there did you have any comments to make to marina or um of course i mean i'm agreeing with marina and um it's it's such an important i was just saying in the chat earlier that this connection or the dangers of bringing the body back and and this separation as as um for instance when i speak of blackness where it feels like it's a separation of the black body from the human body and what the implications of that is but then from marina speaking of this bringing back of the body in the conversation in relation to the state and as a site for capitalist activity i think it's really interesting to just see what what what we make the body as a collective rather than the body as a biological entity and and what that means but then as i was saying in if we go into queer theory or to some extent into disability studies then the queer the body becomes quite biological as much as it is you know kind of amidst a mode of sociality it becomes also very biological and at a risk of of exceptionalism so yeah basically marina thanks thank you so much robert i wondered if you had any take on that in terms of as you said disability justice but also in a sense then the idea of a collective and how that is then pieced apart through artistic practice which is the ones you outline um i missed because i hit mute as i moved my phone where i was reading the paper uh off the computer screen i missed the beginning of what marina was saying as she was answering a question so um so i'm not sure if you're asking me about that in particular um but i yeah i have lots of thoughts about both today and yesterday about how sort of collected forms of disabled thought can give us ways of navigating the current crisis i was really struck yesterday about how aca was stressing how everyone in the world is talking about this new situation that we're in and and i was saying well actually disabled people have been thinking in these ways for so long uh and so what i wanted to stress was how instead of stressing newness we might learn from disabled artists disabled thinkers disabled people who have had these modes of knowledge for so very long but if i'm not speaking it's something that marina said i'd love to hear again what i was muting no i think that answer is only one i was interested to hear from you i don't know if marina has any following up thoughts but um i wouldn't also i think for me from my perspective in the art world i cannot help but notice to me what seems like a lack of disability work i think it's actually become more and more and more pronounced the absence for me i see less of it in in recent years then i think maybe it seems like a period of the 80s and it's kind of in a way it's kind of moved away you know certainly from parts of the art world that i go to uh or more sort of you know it's more sort of mainstream and i think it's incredibly important to actually address that absence but also particularly as you said in the life of the pandemic um and the fact that actually these conversations aren't being addressed through those voices is as you say incredibly as short incredibly shocking in a way um does anybody i would say just to follow up on that i mean i think that what disability artists often face is a perceived disconnect between those two words when they go together disability art uh and so uh astela for instance in brazil um really as we're talking getting ready for this presentation this week she was talking about how important it is for her work to be seen as art and for the term disability not to trump art in a negative way and so for me it's really important to put those together and see disability as a way of reconceiving art and art also as a way of reconceiving disability does anyone else have any comments oh here we have uh nao any thoughts on disability art being seen as spectacle it's from nao i mean the point that i was making about this double move is that a certain kind of neoliberal spectacularization of disability is sort of happening everywhere um and it often happens as my examples are suggesting through sport so the paralympics uh the world cup and and so forth put forward a disability identity that again obscures the fact that actual disabled people are suffering so much can disability art be part of that process i think absolutely i think capitalism is so capable of vampirizing anything that it's it's entirely possible that disability art will be um part of that spectacularization that obscures what's actually happening with disabled bodies um however i do think that um forms of krip art globally um are in some ways really resistant to those forms of spectacularization and commodification um in some ways much more than than global queerness which has kind of been co-opted um so easily um so i guess the answer would be disability in art can totally be part of spectacle that covers over what's actually happening um but i think disability in art can put forward alternative forms of spectacle that might be less uh that might be more resistance to commodification and just following up from julia smith she asks you robert from an excellent intervention uh what do you think krip krip epistemologies has to bring to art criticism slash art history uh that's such a big question and i hope my fellow panelists will also have have thoughts on it um but if krip epistemologies are sort of disabled ways of knowing then i would hope that to arch criticism and art history uh krip epistemologies are constantly putting forward sort of alternative ways of perceiving so um teatro ciego for example in in mexico city it's like well one thinks of dance as almost entirely this visual art form um but theater of the blind in mexico city is it's basically putting forward the presumption at the beginning that of why why do we have to start with with that idea that visual visuality is the center of dance um so i guess just sort of alternative ways of perceiving alternative ways of navigating the world alternative ways of of motion are what krip epistemologies would bring to art criticism and art theory i see lon is just added here can marina and robert maybe speak a bit more about the relationship between individual and collected subjects in their papers marina said something about towards the end about the self-proprietal subject and robert pointed to spectacularization which you just alluded alluded to which would relate to individual specialized specialization that the language of bodies and activism such as struggles around the protest at paralympics engage a collective subject in different more or less concrete ways i would be interested to hear more on this and the relation of the concrete to the individual slash the slash the collective thank you both for very interesting papers um should i go first um yeah um i think i think maybe the kind of background question is when we discuss ourselves talk about our political subject our existence as political subjects in terms of bodies rather than in terms of people or groups or anything else which already starts with a collective dimension i think there could be there's a reference to the experience of the world that can also be intensely personal as well as collective and the political moment is how does that personal experience translate to a collective and then back so it's a kind of constant reciprocal movement and that's the kind of movement of politics basically is like relationship of the individual to the social i guess the kind of question i was trying to develop there is whether there's a dimension of kind of a sort of isolation to the idea of an individual body which doesn't get overcome by the language of bodies because it can just be a sort of aggregation of individual bodies and the question of proprietorship was i mean this is maybe something Fred Moten has written about a little bit which i didn't get to bring into the piece that i'm publishing but kind of referring back to where 10 spillers on the flesh versus the body as two ways of thinking about somatic experience or the somatic as a kind of target of violence of differential racialized violence so the body is a kind of self-contained self-owning individual in a sense in that schema in that argument and the flesh is kind of what what happens when there's this kind of process of deprivation of gender of humanity and the consequent sort of targeting for exploitation violence oppression abuse that comes with that so i guess what i was thinking is whether this ownership relation is sufficiently thematized when we think of the political dimension of bodies that's maybe something i would like to explore further in writing i haven't done yet as well as the kind of discussion that neo was alluding to with kind of the naturalization of a body in some queer theory which i also have to get more familiar with but yeah that was i think enough in terms of me trying to speculatively access those terms yeah this is a great question to think through and with and i would stress first of all that there have certainly been disability movements especially in the united states that have been really focused on individualism and independence and have drawn on problematic us traditions of independence and individualism but at its best the disability movement is always about stressing a collective subject so the watchword of the global disability movement is nothing about us without us and so that phrase of us and sort of focusing on collectivity in that very watchword is is so important and has arguably sort of spearheaded other movements so nothing about us without us or nada sovene nosotras sin nosotras in spain for example ended up spearheading the anti-austerity movement so nothing about us without us became sort of they don't represent us and so the disability movement in spain focusing on a sort of shared vulnerability ended up being passed to activists in general resisting austerity and saying we're all vulnerable and let's collectively put forward that that that us that might do something to change the world thank you robert and thank you marina i think in interest of time we should move on and move to jade um jade patiently been there um hello uh are you sharing a film with us or are you planning do you wish to speak beforehand or should i just quickly speak beforehand uh i'll try and be really quick in my speaking uh in let me introduce you first if i may um jade monster antler is a recipient of the stewart hall foundation scholarship which supported her phd raised representation in northern britain in the context of the black atlantic a creative practice project she's been awarded one of two jay with student drawing prizes in 2017 for the project no need for clothing jade's rainbow tribe project a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of black culture from the perspective of black diaspora is central to the production of her work which includes her 24 hour performance review for the spill festival in october 2018 recent solo exhibitions include at the blue coat in the purple whole street hols humber street gallery and she was commissioned by art on the underground to create the 2018 winter night tube cover and is this year's innova and manchester art gallery uh future collective projects um so there we go and jade here we go uh on just quickly when you mentioned the buyer i do like i would like to um uh dedicate my allocated time today uh thank you all and thanks for amazing um papers before great to meet you all uh yeah i'd like to dedicate um today uh my contribution to sarah reid um who i um i tried to dedicate an aspect of that work to at the time and you can see um that's online um but yeah i would like to play um a film from youtube that i've just um it's just um gone live with um scarborough museum's trust local museum and gallery but also i'd really like to mention just um that i'm finding francis ryan's um book on on disability um invaluable at the moment and her um twitter feed um i also would like to briefly mention we were we were discussing artists and i'd really like to mention um tammi reynolds um and also i'm taking a lot a lot from me and mingus uh uh who works with um adrian adrian mary brown and others um the the film and my work um it i i suppose i'm always exploring sorry i don't have a paper as such but i just want to mention some of these things um a code of codification in graduating scales of humanization and and and trying to negotiate where um i sit in my experiences within that um and my work is seeking to um uh work through what a ethics of care in an art context is given that um we're all familiar with the fact that so many bodies are expendable outside of within and within the industry um uh i'm just going to quickly put it in some links to the chat um uh which go further into um my understandings uh of blackness um in terms of um expendable disposable bodies and also a recent um article that i wrote collectively um uh and was published in arts professional in the last week or so um that um sets out some of my and my peers understanding of um uh bodies working in for one of a better word the gig and economy that neo is mentioning um and beyond uh but uh the film i play is called chronicle um i a i'll try and uh not play it all but i'd like to show you a little bit um and i was thinking when i first made it uh well was first coming to make it about um each cedric's idea of reparative reading um and um yeah i'll i'll play a share screen share screen a red light eliminates a hallway seen from a the camera moves towards the segment of the open door and walks through into the dark room beyond the hallway limpses of light become visible beyond as the camera edges forward through the blackness we see through a window and dawn is breaking the curtains are opened and the expanse through the window is clearer and wider corners of suburban roofs and foliage from trees and bushes are in silhouette the sky is pale blue with smudges of orange on the horizon and indigo blue clouds brood above the conversation takes place between jade Montserrat and andrew and katelyn wegellis over four zoom meetings from their respective homes i've just pressed record i'm terribly sorry i just want to say a content warning um later on it's not actually 14 minutes long 10 or something uh but there is there are some images of colonial atrocities um from our local museum scarborough museums trust they're um uh taken um at the end of the 19th century mint 19th century we brought with the camera into a front garden and down onto a way with law camped by a sign i just broke up when you said that just try and close some windows here as the camera pans up with a double rainbow comes into focus oh yeah that's that's a good idea i can do that too jade is a brown woman with african heritage hair over the course of the meetings her hair is worn sometimes in an afro and sometimes in plats sorry this is andrew is a white man who often wears a chain around his neck and t-shirt katelyn is a white woman she wears tie dye t-shirts like a glitch out like you know how we when you're on zoom that happens in in dreams now just in normal times yeah it's extraordinary oh my god the like conditions of this time see pin subconscious is this like there's a bit of frustration and a bit of nervousness and a bit of like yeah when somebody is speaking and you can't get the whole sentence and you're just trying to make it up as well like trying to figure out what it could be that they're saying you have digital dreams the camera is recording a walk and looks behind the direction of travel to catch another glimpse of the rainbows we're walking towards the sunrise on the north seas horizon a fence runs the length of the path on the left hand side of the frame and then when 60 000 people are dead and a disproportionate amount are disabled elderly and black and brown people that's a project and so if then people are saying well the government's saying it's okay well when is it that we claim our own when is it that we rebel then or when is it that we know the camera points towards an expanse of sea in the middle of the frame is a fishing boat the overall light is pink tinged we zoom in on the boat seagulls sit on the surface of the water that's so good the camera pans wildly from a small dark wood table with a laptop sat atop open and facing jade showing a tab open with jade's g-mail jade is in the study and is attempting to angle a video camera in her hand to point towards her laptop but what would you do if somebody was challenging your role as a film maker and as an artist and was saying it's non-essential and then you say but what about music and they say you're not you are not musicians I mean there's always the argument that artists are making sense of the world that in a way we're you know that when we look back throughout any period in history and pre-history we look to the art of the time to give us a sense of the human condition and that I just think it's hard because people get so caught on that usefulness like the kind of functionality of what we do and it's hard to argue that point yeah because I thought I'm going to just quickly share my screen again jade shares her screen and the two layers of images the screen share and a background become transparent the bottom layer shows katelyn and andrew filming profile but I yeah at some point it would be really good to I got this from the Harrison collection as well I'm not sure if I sent it to you she enlarges this document and the image of Anjan Kate fades out but it's not something looking at Harrison under the centralised title script is a reproduction of an old photograph of Colonel James Harrison he has a handlebar moustache and knowing a little bit around um what he's about I'm not sure it's something I would like to embark on by myself and so I wondered whether you consider like us just like reading that intervals you know from that a photographic slideshow from the Harrison collection plays in the upper right hand corner jade continues to open up small window views of random photographs taken from one of the Harrison collection files jade angles the camera in the study and it shows her face up close behind a screen of garden cut pink and red roses in a bowl she places her nose into the roses sniffs deeply and rotates the bowl to show the roses to the screen metal prongs for the metal prongs really and it just kind of slides on well fits on the bottom and pushes up kind of thing katelyn and andrew a teaching jade how to use a handheld camera over zoom perfect looks right and then did it just come on no there's another battery here I think if you if you close the screen and then um put it open it again it should there is another is it yeah there you go it's on perfect that's enough I'm not sure I think we're well over time yeah thanks jade I think that's a good time to maybe uh draw close to that film and I think you can watch it it's available online so people can watch the rest of the film after the talk um thanks again for sharing it it's a wonderful I mean it covers some it covers so many parts of your life and also the kind of this sort of archive of to um was that a decision to share that labor of looking at that work was that part of the reason to work with these two artists yeah uh there's only so much capacity we all have and I think also Scarborough Museums Trust I've lived here all my life they've rolled out that taxidermy collection all my life and no mention of Colonel Harrison and I think it's it's a collection that the context is something that's been hidden in plain sight and I think that that's what we're seeing when we're talking about invisibilized bodies or you know marginalized bodies um was it was there's the absence um and uh I need I have needs part of the the um the essentials that I'm kind of interested in trying to um draw together our collective essentials um uh is that uh it I've known physical isolation uh most of my life definitely in the foremost years of my life and not having main electricity or neighbors or family or and being in a in a totally white environment for most of my life including you know when I get to university at Courtauld etc um so I think I'm now able to say what I need and in the absence of any staff at Scarborough Museums Trust who are of color or um uh you know it's a particularly sort of ableist and um white middle class environment I need to speak with with people who are at the the very least sort of and I'm kind of sort of erring away from the idea of allyship but like these uh white web ellis uh generously um definitely um in solidarity uh it is as we consider um justice um anti-racist justice and what the broader implications of that's um in terms of anti-capitalism um I think yeah yesterday I saw that Mia Mingus had put up you can't be an anti-racist if you're not anti-capitalist so I um yeah I I really needed um I need to maintain my energy reserves and actually I can fall back a little bit on the labor of web ellis and I think that they'd be okay with me saying that does anyone have any questions or about Jade's work I would quickly like to ask Jade um is there for you making work an act of care itself and is it then is it something you see as part of that practice of self care and self acknowledgement are these two things connected for you? Yeah and actually I'm almost reaching the end um point of like trying trying to reply to emails um at the moment and I feel a bit emotional in that um I hope that I will be able to resume making I'm not carving out time at the moment for that um as much as I'd like to but for different commissions or different activities or workshops that I'm able to participate in or facilitate uh there's a hospital field one coming up on Monday and in preparation for that I will work through some drawings but everything's like for something and I know that um many of my queer trans peers of colour who are speaking with me at the moment are saying you know like and I would agree but somehow I think um like um was discussed before I've lived in an isolated environment so I have resources that I have had to use for survival that haven't gone away but um in answer to your question yet uh like what I'm hearing is that people that there are commissioning opportunities but that there's an outcome required and actually what people really really need to um maybe consider is that the connection between um sort of uh yeah our mental health and our health and creativity um is totally into interlinked you it's not you can't separate it and I think people I think my peers um and I don't want to be speaking for anyone else but it would be I've always been again sort of out for our sake but like why not actually people have done that and maybe like it might be I would like to do that I would really like to um in my lifetime what I'm working towards um is to not in any facetious way but I really want to paint um botanical um do botanical paintings I just want to paint but I also maybe want to make a film or I don't know like yeah it's really healing just like the garden is or being by the sea is part of us and it's a connection between us and I think that that's what's so upsetting um when um yeah uh the arts are marginalised and yet they in the capitalist world it generates so much money I like there just seems to be um yeah like a dissonance that I can't get my head around and that also I haven't eaten yet um I'd like the audience to never watching to start thinking about final questions and of course our panelists as well to start maybe thinking of some maybe final thoughts but Jade I also wanted to ask you because I think your work has such a specific relationship to language um you know from the way you draw to actually even in that video the voiceover and the cut the sort of the way in which you describe the images that we are seeing um I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what language constitutes for you as a very material body and what that body might mean for you I hope I can answer this I'm not sure I'll try I think um I was speaking yesterday on the phone to somebody who provides books for young women um uh and we spoke for the first time and she spoke about my accent I know you've asked specifically about language but I but I remember when I first went to university and I had some sort of existential crisis because I couldn't recognise my voice and I it's weird that I'm actually holding my hand in front of it because it does feel like an object of like different um influences and I am now performing those um uh the impact of certain education and an environment so for me I'm constantly trying to review my own use of language and also I'm I'm I'm joining ways of expressing together um through this collective that I feel I'm a part of with you Chris and with all of you on the panel and beyond that our language and our bodies are connected and can be united but there is a dis a dissonance often um given where we stand stand on the margin so I have to speak a certain language to be heard also like my the way that I articulate has has to be shaped for a certain audience just like a certain audience if you want to say that way or a gaze has determined that I'm a racialized body so I wouldn't have had a language for that up until a certain point in my life until it was made clear that that was who I was so um I'm trying to um speak and it's hard for all of us thank you Jay for that observation um I was also someone from Liverpool I relate to your initial reaction to having an accent and my accent similarly I've to well anyway there's a different story anyone else have any thoughts um or final ruminations that I'd like to share with the group Lauren are you still with us I see your cameras are you there Lauren? I am but I did not want to let me put my camera back on um I think it says the host hid me and uh um no I just really enjoyed hearing Jay talk about it and also enjoyed seeing the film and it's it feels incredibly kind of it just feels very resonant and it's really interesting to see a work that um like captures a lot of what our experience has been on screens over oh I've been asked to start my video hello everyone um uh it captures a lot of like just some of the strange physical sensations or auditory sensations of sitting in front of a screen all day and speaking to people on screens and it's just really interesting to see a work like to see that kind of certified or concretized in some way in a in a work so that's all I wanted to say really but thank you Jade. Yeah and I think also the uh all the glitching and the kind of disruption that is part of that film is very I mean it's such a kind of uh you know it's reflective of all of our experiences and the experience that we're having today you know yeah it's just sort of I've just put it in the chat thanks the link is there thank you. Anyone see we've got any more quick I don't think we have it do we have any more questions Danny or anything from the floor I see we I think we've answered most questions um I think one's in the Q&A box yes but no raised hands yeah uh Lizzie Harmshire asks I feel like there's not that not I feel like there's not time that there is but what uh Jade just said about speaking was so interesting and maybe it would be interesting to think about this in relation to Marina's passing comment about Lecan and the unconscious being stripped like a language any thoughts on Lecan Marina no that was really just it was really just a passing reference um yeah just as a kind of like something that a lot of contemporary theory and politics would maybe want to move away from I guess but at the same time the idea of language maybe the other idea of language being material which I think has been what we've been talking about for the last few minutes is I think maybe not something that should be like language should maybe not be bracketed or sidelined entirely but maybe our approach to it can be transformed whether theoretically or otherwise as a material process and I guess to an extent trying to maybe build you know what Lizzie maybe is sort of referring to as well as the sort of the language that appears in Jade's work and this this sort of the narrative or this unconscious structuring of the way we look and the way we observe I think that is certainly true in Jade's practices yeah I think sorry you meant about like the works the work that I do like on paper and and how I maybe do in the sorry I veered off into sorry no I think yeah I think both I mean in terms of language in your work Jade I think it's both in both of the things that you're describing both the material drawings that you use and this is the way in which you performance the performances that you make in relationship to those drawings but also then in this the instance of this film yeah thanks Marina final comments anyone any final final thoughts we can start wrapping up okay well that leaves me just to thank Jade, Neo, Marina, Robert and Laan and of course Anna and Ella and Danny for organizing being part of this talk as well my sincere thanks and to say um thank you for being here we this is the end of the two days and hopefully we'll be able to expand and develop these and other ways going forward many thanks and goodbye