As part of the GEM Lab’s seminar on Video/Art/TV: Digital Aesthetics and Politics, we are holding a reading group and screening focused on Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020).
//Thursday, Dec. 1
//5:00 PM
//GEM Lab
Grounded in contemporary art, queer and feminist thought, Black studies, digital cultures, and new media, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto is a collection of short essays arguing for the liberatory potential of the glitch, here conceived as a form of refusal, failure, and survival rather than as a digital error or malfunctioning. The glitch between gender, digital technology, and the body disrupts the logic of the gender binary and its restrictive categorizations, opening up limitless possibilities for experimenting, exploring, and re-performing our identities.
Reading: chapters 0-3, 6-7, and 9 of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (approx. 40 pages). We kindly ask attendees to read this selection before the seminar to enrich our group discussion. Register on Eventbrite to sign up and receive access to the reading.
Legacy Russell is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of the experimental new media, art, and performance institution The Kitchen, New York. Formerly the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, the University of London with a focus on Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell currently lives and works in New York.
Screening (Total viewing time: 41:43 minutes)
The screening features video works by contemporary artists Sondra Perry, American Artist, and Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin) who put glitch feminism into practice.
American ARTIST
Blue Life Seminar (2019)
HD Video, 19:31 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council
Written by American Artist with text by Christopher Dorner, performed by Christopher Grant, animated by Matthew Mann & Tommy Martinez, and music by Greg Fox.
A cosmic avatar tells a story reflecting on implicit bias and the role of technology.
SIN Wai Kin
Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means (2018), from the performance series A View from Elsewhere (2018)
HD single-channel video, 5:38 minutes
Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection
Sin Wai Kin’s former persona, Victoria Sin, appears as a living deity, whose presence embodies and pushes against codes of representation found in brothels from the turn of the century, burlesque, and Beaux Arts female nude painting.
Sondra PERRY
IT’S IN THE GAME ‘17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection (2017)
Video, 16:34 minutes
Courtesy of the artist, Bridget Donahue, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Open-source 3D design sharing platforms and gaming capitalize on the simulation of bodies and objects while alternatives for human agency and the circulation of images emerge.
American Artist is an artist who makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions were presented at REDCAT, Los Angeles (2022); LABOR, Mexico City (2021); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021). Their work was included in group exhibitions across the world, most recently at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2021); San Jose Museum of Art, United States (2020); and Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, South Korea (2020). Artist currently lives and works in New York.
Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin) uses speculative fiction and drag as a practice of purposeful embodiment to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Their work questions the reification and ascription of ideal images within technologies of representation and systems of looking. Sin was nominated for the Turner Prize 2022. Sin’s performances and works were shown internationally, such as, most recently, at Somerset House, London (2022), the Guggenheim, New York (2022), the Tank Museum, Shanghai (2020), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2019); MOMENTA biennale de l’image, Montreal (2019), Hayward Gallery, London (2019); and the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Sin currently lives and works in London.
Sondra Perry is an artist known for uniting concerns about technology and identity and mixing visual vocabularies from the past and future into a distinctive present tense. Solo exhibitions were presented at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland (2022), Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts (2021), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio (2019), among many others. Her work was included in group exhibitions across the world, such as the Venice Biennale (2022), Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2022), Iand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021), and Future Generation Art Prize in Venice (2019). Perry currently lives and works in Perth Amboy, NJ.