Art Criticism and the Pandemic

Chris McCormack is a writer, associate editor of Art Monthly, co-deviser of The Producers, a series of talks in collaboration with Art Monthly and Newcastle University and co-founder and judge of the Michael O’Pray prize for new writing on moving image with Film and Video Umbrella. He is the editor of Charlotte Prodger’s forthcoming monograph (Koenig), commissioning editor of ON&BY Andy Warhol (MIT/Whitechapel) and has contributed numerous essays and texts for catalogues, including James Richards’s Requests and Antisongs. He also writes fiction and has collaborated with numerous artists including Hilary Lloyd and Ursula Mayer, while his research into vocal development was published as part of Richards’s Welsh Pavilion in Venice, Voce di testa. He also curated the exhibition and edited the book Anarchic Sexual Desires of Plain Unmarried Schoolteachers.

Jade Montserrat has been the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supported her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was also awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Jade’s Rainbow Tribe project – a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of Black Culture from the perspective of the Black Diaspora is central to the ways she is producing a body of work, including No Need For Clothing and its iterations, as well as her performance work Revue. Jade was commissioned to present Revue as a 24-hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance in October 2018; a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, (November to 10 March 2019) which toured to Hull’s Humber Street Gallery (July to September 2019) and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover. Iniva and Manchester Art Gallery have commissioned Jade as the first artist for the Future Collect project (2020).

Khairani Barokka is an Indonesian writer, artist, and translator in London, whose work has been presented extensively, in fifteen countries. She was Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-In-Residence, and is Researcher-in-Residence and Research Fellow at UAL's Decolonising Arts Institute. Among Okka’s honours, she was an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow and a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change for arts practice and research. Okka is co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches), author-illustrator of Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis; Vietnamese translation published by AJAR Press), and author of debut poetry collection Rope (Nine Arches Press). Among recent exhibitions were Annah: Nomenclature (ICA) and Selected Annahs (SALTS Basel; Artforum Must-See).

David Dibosa is co-author of Post-Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (Routledge). He trained as a curator, after receiving his first degree from Girton College, Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD in Art History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is currently Reader in Museology at University of the Arts London, where he leads the MA in Curating and Collections. David is a Trustee of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and a Member of Advisory Boards for Tate Britain and the Paul Mellon Centre. David’s television appearances include BBC 1’s Big Painting Challenge, in which he was a judge. He is also currently a presenter for Art on the BBC, showing on BBC 4.

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She has published two books, most recently Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015), which was runner-up in the Polari First LGBT Book Award in 2016. Her short fiction and essays have been included in several anthologies, and her journalism and criticism has been published in Granta, Sight & Sound, Frieze, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and many other places. She has made two short films: Approach/Withdraw (2016) with artist Ker Wallwork, and You Will Be Free (2017), both of which have screened in galleries and festivals across Europe. In summer 2018, she was Artist in Residence at the Izolyatsia cultural platform in Kyiv. She hosts the political arts podcast Suite (212), and teaches at the Royal College of Art and elsewhere.

Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz is Exhibitions Curator at Wellcome Collection and Guest Editor for the forthcoming Documents of Contemporary Art: HEALTH (Co-published by The MIT Press / Whitechapel Gallery, September 2020). Her exhibitions include ‘This is a Voice’ (2016), ‘Bedlam’ (co-curated with Mike Jay, 2017), ‘Ayurvedic Man’ and ‘Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery: Misbehaving Bodies’ (co-curated with George Vasey, 2019–20). She has written for Afterall, Concreta, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, MARG and Mousse Publishing.

Rehana Zaman (b. Heckmondwike) is an artist based in London. She works predominantly with moving image to examine how social dynamics are produced and performed. Her work speaks to the entanglement of personal experience and social life, where intimacy is framed against state coercion and bio politics. Recent and upcoming exhibitions British Art Show 9 (2021), Serpentine Projects, London, UK (2020); Liverpool Biennial 2018, Liverpool, UK and CCA, Glasgow, UK (2018). Her films and installations have been shown at Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, India; Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival; Sheffield Doc/Fest; ICA Miami, USA; SAVAC, Canada; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; Whitechapel, London and Bétonsalon Paris. In 2019 she co-edited Tongues with Taylor Le Melle published by PSS and curated The Range; a group exhibition at Eastside Projects, Birmingham. She was shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award in 2019 and her films are distributed by LUX Artist Moving Image.

Larne Abse Gogarty is a Lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Previous to this, she was the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She recently completed her first book, entitled Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art, forthcoming with the Historical Materialism book series. She has also begun a second book, forthcoming with Sternberg Press, which will be a collection of essays on contemporary art and politics. Larne regularly writes criticism for Art Monthly and has recently published essays in Third Text, and the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.

Robert McRuer is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches disability studies, queer theory, and critical theory more generally. He is the author, most recently of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (NYU, 2018), which focuses on the UK and examines the ways in which disability is an undertheorized component of a global austerity politics. He is also the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU, 2006), as well as numerous other books and articles. With Anna Mollow, he is co-editor of Sex and Disability (Duke, 2012), and with David Bolt, the general co-editor of the six-volume series A Cultural History of Disability (Bloomsury, 2020), which includes volumes from antiquity to the modern age.

Neo Sinoxolo Musangi is an independent queer feminist whose work-life is in art, academia and creative writing. Between 2013 and early 2017, Neo was the Humanities Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), Kenya. Before then, Neo had quit a Doctoral Fellowship at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. They now work as a maker of things- who writes about art when they cannot make it. They also double up as a part-time lecturer in Gender Studies at St. Lawrence University, Kenya Program and is currently working on a collection of essays titled, Public Sex: Failure and Postcolonial Mediocrity in the Biographical Archive. Neo lives in Kajiado, Kenya with their three Maasai Shepherd Dog-children: Kabelo, Rotimi and Lerato.

Marina Vishmidt is a writer, editor and educator. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Ephemera, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, Australian Feminist Studies, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is one of the organisers of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic). She publishes and participates in academic and non-academic contexts, on topics related to the political economies of art and labour, social reproduction, and philosophy.