Geneva Lavern Beckford 2021-2027
Intersectional Feminism as Museum Intervention
Issues regarding inequality and exclusion continue to be at the centre of museum discourse and criticisms, despite significant research by feminist, decolonial, and queer theorists to highlight the links between structural inequality and the influence of colonialism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy within art history and institutions. Informed by prior feminist institutional critique, the research undertaken is concerned with identity-based exclusion and structural inequality within the museum as an artistic institution. Proposing the use of an intersectional framework to combat these issues at both an organisational and curatorial level, intersectionality is deployed as a form of institutional critique and as an analytical lens. At an organisational level, the research analyses the internal power structures and dynamics of the museum, advocating for an organisational restructuring to facilitate the necessary conditions to allow for changes to curatorial practice as well as to actively lessen the impacts of structural inequality. At the curatorial level, it explores disproportionate consequences of identity-based exclusion on those understood multiply marginalised, advocating for the use of intersectionality as way of seeing to work toward a conscious curating.
Geneva Lavern Beckford has a background in history, art history and feminist practice. Following on from her MA in Exhibition Studies (LJMU), her research and research projects focus on implementing intersectionality as a form of institutional critique. Throughout her studies, her core beliefs have remained centred on championing equal access and inclusion within the arts.
Marta Espiridião 2022-2026
Feminist Killjoys: New Embodiments in Moving-Image
This Ph.D. project aims to establish a direct relationship between the democratization of the arts and accessibility to art-making devices and the global advent of film in the XX century, which made these technologies accessible to women, queer, and racialized bodies, at the same time that questions of gender, sexuality and race hegemony started to be rendered visible. By considering how the exponential accessibility to filmic devices in different places and narratives enabled new representations and experiences to bloom, especially from various feminist and decolonial lenses and world-making senses, this project will tapper into the growing political and social questions that permeated these creations, while mapping out the possibilities of the medium. Looking at the historical precedents for video-art and its’ expanded possibilities, this research will also look at what is going on now within the field of moving image (considering the giant technological leap of the last decade), specially at the growing visibility of queer and non-binary artists in the public scope, and the possibilities of world-making, identity fluidity and representation in video – always informed by a practical approach to engaged and feminist curating.
Marta Espiridião is an independent curator, writer and researcher, whose investigation scope ranges from feminist and queer theory, architecture, magic, speculative fiction and contemporary art. Latest exhibitions and programmes include “Artifício” (2023), a solo show by Odete in the Municipal Galleries of Lisbon; collective exhibition and public programme “Error 417: Expectation Failed” (2021-2), Oporto Municipal Gallery; and Andreia Santana’s “Sonic Materialities” (2020), ARTES Porto. Amongst several independent curatorial projects, is highlighted “Bodies in Space – critical archive of non-normative experiences of the city” (Lisbon), a sonic space to re-think the place of non-normative bodies within urban landscapes, their relations to common surroundings, and how the city exerts discriminatory violence over identities and bodies.
Helen Kaplinsky 2020-2025
Protofeminisms: monstrous femininities in contemporary art beyond ‘cyberfeminisms’ and ‘posthumanisms’
The thesis develops curatorial practice and scholarship on feminine, often monstrous historical subjects in contemporary art, termed protofeminisms. These ancestors, proto organisms, monstrous mythologies and medieval mystics that feature in recent artistic practices of case-studies Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Tai Shani and Jenna Sutela (since 2016) are understood as temporal foldings of the past into images of queer futurity and political imagination. Through a mapping of the historical field, focus is brought to protofeminisms as an under-studied element of artists and theorists with earlier practices associated with cyberfeminisms, which emerged in the context of critical posthumanism and Feminist Science and Technology. However, the analysis of work since 2016 requires a renewal of existing frameworks and language that reaches beyond the field of posthumanism, the terminology ‘cyberfeminisms’ and more recent developments in new materialisms. Protofeminisms is a discursive tool that gathers and tests responses to gaps in posthumanism across a distinct disciplinary spectrum including feminist medieval scholarship and black studies.
Helen Kaplinsky is a London and Helsinki based independent curator and writer with research that spans questions of postdigital identity, femininity and ownership. She has recently curated events and exhibitions with Helsinki Art Museum, PUBLICS and Museum of Impossible Forms (Finland) and Tallinn Kustihoone (Estonia). Her last major group exhibition was GENDERS: Shaping and Breaking the Binary, Science Gallery London (2020). In 2015 she co-founded Res., a mutable curatorial organisation and workspace based in South East London. Fellowships with the Contemporary Art Society and the Arts Council Collection (UK) both considered the relationship between property and collections. She has worked for artist studios through boards and R&D and taught on Fine Art and Curating programmes internationally. Her writing can be found in art magazines, catalogues, and academic collections.
James Schofield 2017-2021
The Artist-Led Condition: Reframing Self-Organisation in the Visual Arts in the UK Post-2007
The research critically explores artist-led self-organisation in the UK following the Financial Crisis (2007), charting the impacts of neoliberal precarity on practitioners. Situated within a broader discourse on self-organisation in the visual arts and cultural resistance to neoliberal hegemony in times of austerity, the research addresses key questions relating to socio-economic conditions of practice; resistance to systems of social organisation and governance; and the impact of increased networking capabilities. Outlining how artist-led self-organisation has become established as the methodology for the majority of practitioners in the period post-2007, it shows the terminology itself is defunct and does not describe the self-organised methodologies present in contemporary practice. Instead it proposes the ‘artist-led condition’ as a way to re-frame those self-organised practices, enabling a social and productive benefit to practitioners through a framework of collectivisation. One that acts as a composition of individuals acting in common rather than flattening differences into a homogenous mass, supporting them to be politically active in their own circumstances. Allowing for the formation of networked and localised forms of resistance to neoliberal governance in solidarity with one another, it provides practitioners with a new framework of practice presenting new possibilities for social change.
James Schofield is an artist-curator, Editor of Corridor8, and Sessional Lecturer at Liverpool School of Art and Design teaching across Fine Art, History of Art and Museum Studies, and Exhibition Studies. Working extensively in the field of artist-led practice, his research is concerned with critically exploring artistic existence in relation to self-organisation, neoliberalism, globalisation and network culture. Recent projects include organising the symposium What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About The Artist-Led (Exhibition Research Lab), and collaborations with the Research Pavilion (57th Venice Biennale), Radio Kosaten, and Akibatamabi 21 (both Tokyo). Most recently Schofield has had work published in OFF_CENTRE DRAFT #1 (PINK), CHAIN/MAIL Issue 3 (Corridor8), and Contemporary Research Intensive (The Contemporary Condition).
Gabriela Saenger Silva 2019-2022
Rethinking Biennials as Educational Tools
Discursive programmes are a fast-growing strategy used by contemporary art biennials to enhance, contra point and/or contribute to their exhibitions. The proliferation of such kinds of programmes in the last decades in biennials – that Green and Gardner identify as “self-conscious biennials” – provide an immense body of knowledge. The prominence of such programmes reflects how biennials are both interconnected in a global network and how they respond to different theoretical turns of recent contemporary art history (such as the discursive turn, educational turn, and social turn, and currently towards a decolonial turn). However, despite the accumulation of knowledge provided by the programmes to both biennial studies and exhibition studies, there is a lack of ‘archaeology’ of these processes. The idea of this research is to use the experiences from Mercosul and Liverpool Biennial to investigate it.
Gabriela Saenger Silva is an educator and arts practitioner. Holding a BA in Public Relations and MA in Theory, History and Critics of Visual Arts, she was Operations Coordinator for Mercosul Biennial from 2007 to 2013, guest curator for Bienal de São Paulo 2018 and Mediation Coordinator for Liverpool Biennial in 2016 and 2018.
Sevie Tsampalla 2016-2023
Commoning the Biennial or the Biennialisation of the Commons?
The research examines commoning as a practice within or against contemporary art biennials. Biennials have been hosting discourses on commons, struggles central for transformative politics and social life beyond capitalism. Intersecting with commoning, post-Occupy artists’ demands for politicising art and institutions often target biennials for ambivalent positions that sustain both radical left-wing rhetoric and ties to neoliberal interests, affecting a ‘biennial legitimacy crisis’. In the research, the understanding of commoning as everyday practices of sharing, cooperation and solidarity draws on self-managed art spaces and refugee housing occupations in Athens, theorised as ‘emergent common spaces’ or ‘urban solidarity spaces’. It is in these debates and contexts two case studies that share a curatorial intent to ‘learn from’ commoning practices and the solidarity cultures of Athens are situated: Athens Biennale 5-6, OMONOIA (2015-2017) and documenta 14, Learning from Athens (2017).
Sevie Tsampalla has a background in art history and cultural studies, and experience working with artists, curating, and producing artworks and exhibitions. Her research and projects explore the sociopolitical potentialities that emerge at the intersections of art, exhibition making and urban everyday politics. Tsampalla initiated urban interventions in Athens and Brussels with artist collectives Reconstruction Community and AAA respectively, and curated Jonas Vansteenkiste-Mr House at Trophy Room, Liverpool (2016); Fabric Spaces [make city], Pianofabriek, Brussels (2015); small Change at AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent (2013); and Some Misunderstanding at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2013). As Assistant Curator for Liverpool Biennial 2016, and Cluster-Curator for Track, a citywide exhibition by S.M.A.K. Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art Ghent (2012), she was responsible for curating and producing participatory performances, installations, conferences and publications.