a dead writer exists in words and language is a type of virus
In the past they had tried to tell them, warn them (worn thin). At every single conference or lecture around the world they’d say:
HI HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT HOW YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT THE FUTURE BUT YOU’VE ONLY CITED WHITE MEN HEY HOW ARE YOU GONNA STOP THAT HEY WHAT KIND OF FUTURE IS THAT?
But every body grows tired eventually, even this one. The same words, again and again, wearing out their throat their blood their muscles knotting, stomach filled with black oil, fingers tapping on the seat of every lecture theatre. But, no, nobody can say they didn’t try to warn them…
A dead writer exists in words and language is a type of virus. Information is at once this resistance, and what it resists— its own dead form, communication. Words are microbes, molecules, maggots. A dead writer also exists in the devastated by cancer rotting corpse; in death.
A DEAD WRITER EXISTS IN WORDS AND LANGUAGE IS A TYPE OF VIRUS was my first solo exhibition in London, at Arcadia Missa Gallery in 2016 and was an element of my 2017 PhD project, Becoming Object: Positioning a Feminist Art Practice
The exhibition consisted of sculptural elements; three videos; two performances; and a series of prints of spells written for/against the artworld. The exhibition, alongside the novella, Virus, thesises four years of performative and more traditional research – engaging with a range of contemporary artists, institutions, and writing practices to reformulate the possibilities for art criticism and institutional critique within artworlds. This practice-based research offers new possibilities for embodied art criticism.
The objects in the exhibition, including a wall embedded with crystals and impossible 3d models, make manifest some of my propositions for queer objects, while also insistently refusing mastery.
