Fine Art, School of Art

Originally a conference paper ('Late Britain: five decades of social insecurity', at OCU), the text characterises post-war to turn-of-millennium culture in the UK, touching on high/low cultural interplay, UK/USA axes, and aspirational architectures.

Ethnicity, globalised production practices and formation of cultural representatives of multiple Chinese identities. An evaluation of post-1997 political takeover anxieties via gender and sexuality on screen, the cinematic body, urbanism and censorship.

Translation is, for Gayatri Spivak, the most intimate act of reading. Working from accented and autoethnographic film, video and installation work, the author examines what is at stake in the intimate act of a daughter translating her mother’s tongue. The author is specifically concerned with representations of psychical, geographic and linguistic displacements within these artistic practices as a means of understanding subject formation, gendered agency, and the politics and poetics of race and ethnicity. By focussing on Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976) and Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988), the author suggests that the translation of one’s mother’s tongue can be thought of as a palimpsestic mode of fragmented layering, and as a detour through which a ‘minor literature’ is visualized.

Beginning with the ubiquity with which art history discusses Pieter Bruegel the Elder's work as allegorical – and the Tower of Babel paintings are no exception – I offer a reassessment of this by contributing to the ongoing debates within Breugel studies on methodology, and, until now, outside of them, on Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory. Through a close reading of the paintings, the art historical literature on the paintings, and a philosophical interpretation of the Tower of Babel narrative, I intervene in the methodological debates by proposing an alternative conception of the dialectical aspects of Bruegel's paintings. I then suggest how an understanding of the dialectical character of the paintings, and a necessarily overdetermined hermeneutics of them, can add to our knowledge of Bruegel's work, and put pressure on our comprehension of Benjamin's writings on allegory and ruins.

This text considers the way in which Freud's notion of working-through in the consulting room can be understood as aligned with the practices of writing, curating and looking at art.

The text considers the work of George Perec, Tacita Dean and T.J. Clark.

A catalogue essay for the exhibition curated by Joanne Morra at the Freud Museum London. The exhibition included work by Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, and Renate Ferro.

The idea of site-responsive art and curatorial strategies is put forward in this text.