BLOOD – Living Alloys

From the earlier emancipation afforded by female bodybuilders through to the paradigm shift created by trans and queer philosophies on life, we shall look at the current moment in terms of decay and regeneration, fusions and alloys, gaming and camouflage as strategies that define human existence. This final Debating Chamber of the season begins with three 7-minute visual and verbal Provocations followed by two responses by Saboteurs, and a public debate.

Provocateurs:
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin/London-based artist. They work predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video game development, focussing on intertwining lived experience with fiction to retell the stories of Black Trans people. Recently they have performed and had solo exhibitions at SCAD, Savanna (2023) Artnight Dundee (2023), Villa Arson, Nice (2023), Fact, Liverpool (2022), David Kordansky, Los Angeles (2022), Project Arts Centre, Ireland (2022); Skänes Konstförening, Malmö (2022); and many more locations. In Germany, their work has been featured in group exhibitions at Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2022); Münchner Kammerspiele (2019); Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2019); and Barbican, London (2018).

Göksu Kunak is an artist, researcher and writer based in Berlin. Göksu’s interest lies in chronopolitics and hybrid texts that deal with the performative lingo(s) of contemporary lifestyles as well as non-Western/unorthodox dramaturgies. Influenced by Arabesk culture and late modernities, Kunak imagines new situations out of real encounters that point to hetero-patriarchal structures. Göksu looks into Orientalism, self-Orientalization, camouflage, self-censorship, science fiction, muscle, simulacra, and the body as a kinetic sculpture. In Berlin their work has been shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Sophiensaele, KW Pogo Bar, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, and other institutions.

Cat Dawson, Ph.D. studies the cultural production of minoritized subjects in the global twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their first book, Monumental: Race, Representation, Culture is forthcoming from MIT Press. Their second book, Trans Form: Imaging Trans Bodies in Science and Society has been solicited from MIT Press for their new series “On Seeing”. They are currently Guest Faculty in Art History at Sarah Lawrence College, US.

Saboteurs:
Mae Howard is a visual artist and ritualist whose interdisciplinary approach extends across research-based, participatory, and collaborative projects ranging from lens-based media, sculpture, installation, and performance. Calling upon lineages of disabled/trans carework, Mae is interested in the embodied, fleshly, and material enmeshment of BDSM, the medical industrial complex, biopolitics, and disability. Their work explores the residue of discard, debilitation, and excess. They are currently a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

Ollie George is an artistic researcher based in Berlin, working between the fields of design, art, and the curatorial. Together with Edi Danartono Winarni and Ekaterina Golovko he convenes Archive for the Eleventh Hour, a curriculum-collective that devotes itself to the creation of counter-historical projects, threading archival materials and polyphonic narration to develop a collectivity that combines the immaterial, spectral, and sonic. Currently, he works as a researcher and producer for Studio Tomás Saraceno. He is a member of the Faculty of MM-U 2023.