My Research
Please see below for an overview of my research from my PhD up to the present
2025
Aesthetics of Ruination
Rupture and the Otherwise
This project is part of the multidimensional research initiative Aesthetics of Ruination which seeks to explore an aesthetics of ruination to remember the past while breaking open more liveable futures. See below for the archival dimension of AoR, Archival Futures and the Art of Living Otherwise.
Rupture and the Otherwise engages performance and wearable sculpture in a haptic exploration of ‘ruination as rupture’ with particular attention to its embodied and sensory dimensions. The project is embedded in the resonances between theoretical writing and embodied performance, exploring the hapticality of returning to, reworking and wearing an object inherently tethered to multiple ruptures that refuse to be captured through visual or written representation. Working towards an eventual performance lecture (May 2025), the project explores the ways in which theoretical work (concepts, speculation, writing) emerges from embodied sensory experience and vice versa. How might rupture as conceptual and haptic register gesture beyond that which feels unliveable in the present? And what more liveable futures might we encounter in this otherwise dimension?
​
This project is made possible with the support of Sandberg Rietveld Research
2023-2025
Aesthetics of Ruination
Archival Futures
Aesthetic of Ruination is a multi-dimensional research project co-curated with Rory Crath and in collaboration with Visual AIDS, which brings together a group of artists and scholars to ask: what is at stake in remembering the aesthetics and feelings of past viral times? In asking this question, our goal is ultimately to feel our way backward to pasts of HIV, to inspire wayward speculations that speak to living otherwise in the present, and futures still (to be) lived. This archival dimension of the project is an invitation to inhabit the Visual AIDS archive as an archive of feeling, an experiment in wayward collectivity to break open the aesthetic imaginaries and intimacies of HIV, along with its representational boundedness. And then to radiate out, beyond the specificities of the Visual AIDS archive, discovering through different art or poetic practices the shapes and contours of an aesthetic and erotics emerging from the past but orienting contemporary arts of living otherwise.
Our programme is inspired by the sensory and affective registers put in motion by Robert Farber and Ronald Lockett, two HIV positive artists active in the early 1990s, who each in their own way turned backward to pasts no longer theirs in order to reach towards a more liveable future. In his Western Blot series, Farber felt his way back to the affective registers of the Black Death and made use of the gothic as a strategy to make sense of his own time and as resource for dreaming other futures. Similarly, Lockett, in salvaging metal scraps from the post-industrial landscape in which he lived and worked, felt his way back to past lived lives. His abstracted and textured landscapes articulate themes of dehumanization and incapacitation while creating lines of flight. Yet they also inspire a more sensory methodology, productive of wayward aesthetics that refuse capture and gesture beyond that which feels unlivable in the present.
Our task is to sift through the imagined traces of what has been lost, discarded, broken or left behind in order to create outputs that speculate, form, perform, and gesture towards more liveable worlds, with and beyond viral pasts and presents, within or away from the worlds Farber and Lockett inhabited.
The programme consists of an immersive studio to be held in New York in April 2025 and a symposium to be held in the fall of 2025.
​
For more information, see http://www.aestheticsofruination.com/
This project is made possible with support of the Terra Foundation for American Art
​
Artwork by Robert Farber, Western Blot #22, New York 1994
2019-2021
Stigma Sensorium
The Stigma Sensorium was a research initiative by Project Stigma led by Annette-Carina van der Zaag (Amsterdam), Rory Crath (Massachusetts) and Paul Boyce (Brighton) in close collaboration with fellow curators Rosa Abbott and Lucy Malone (London), Olga Saavedra Montes De Oca (Brighton/Havana), Anupam Hazra and Amrita Sarkar (Delhi), Denis Nzioka (Nairobi), Kumam Davidson Singh (Imphal) and Graciela Cain and Ari Gaskin (Jacksonville).
Originally Project Stigma was a consortium set out in critical relation to the Fast-Track Cities initiative by UNAIDS (the United Nations AIDS programme for treatment and prevention), as reflected in our initial research sites (later in the project we loosened this focus). The UN FTC partnership is a United Nations global health initiative inviting municipalities in the Global South and North to commit to halting HIV transmission by improving access to HIV prevention and treatment, including through the eradication of stigma. We argued that this focus is crucial for the post-AIDS future promised by UNAIDS, but neglects how people affected by HIV live their bodies in respect of localised socio-economic contexts, sexual cultures, HIV biotechnologies and psychic life.
​
Through our collective engagements, we investigated the complex relations between virality (HIV and later also including COVID-19) and the embodied meanings of stigma, sexual cultures, bio-medical technologies and queer politics. We sought to provide new understandings of stigma as generative instead of merely negative, vital for questioning who is able to partake in the post-AIDS future promised by global health initiatives. Project Stigma explored what it means for queer politics to begin with stigma, elaborating the etymology of stigma as body mark, symptom and wound and engaged these materialities through theory, art and activism.
Early in the project the Covid pandemic escalated and we were forces to change our approach to facilitate our working together remotely and digitally. This change of approach resulted in the Stigma Sensorium, an online living archive and exhibition.
The Stigma Sensorium houses the visual-sonic landscapes produced at our sites, as well as our other knowledge-seeking practices: analyses, communications, musings, reflections, theory. These landscapes are a palimpset of art objects, theories, threads of pandemic communications and analysis that trace the differently embodied, locally contextualised experiences of stigma in their intimate relations to queer sexualities, trans embodiments, modes of racialization and virus. The Sensorium is open-ended and articulates our interest in the materiality of stigma, its fleshiness, felt affect, touch, its hapticality.
​
For a more in depth reading of the Sensorium, see 'Unbearable Sensorium: Sex and the Fugitivity of Critique' published in Parallax
​
This project was funded by the UK Wellcome Trust.
​
Drawing by Laura Ryan, Stigma Sensorium, Brighton 2019
​
2007-2012, 2016-2018
Materialities of Sex in a Time of HIV
The Promise of Vaginal Microbicides
Materialities of Sex in a Time of HIV was my PhD project that I rewrote and published in book format.
Book description:
At present, contemporary materialist feminism is pushing the parameters of feminist critique beyond the human, into posthuman terrains. These developments are an explicit response to the ‘cultural turn’ and its focus on the body as a site for discourse and processes of signification to invest. In contrast to this anthropocentrism, a motley crew of nonhuman allies have entered feminist debate and provoked significant insights into how matter comes to matter - materiality’s own dynamism. Through powerful insights from philosophy and the natural sciences, the body has emerged as a contingent, inherently differentiated and multiple entity which seeps out of its skin and is rather defined in relation to its environment – space, time, nonhuman others and allies. However, as rich as this posthuman landscape of contemporary feminism is, issues of normativity, subjectivity and humanity so central to the ‘cultural turn’ have faded into the background and with it novel analyses of oppressive and subversive sex/gender materialisations. Consequently, feminist issues at stake in the same ‘historical moment’ as contemporary materialisms remain un(der) analysed.
In this book, I question: what are the consequences of feminist theory’s move beyond the human? To what extent has this move resulted in a loss of politics? To critically engage the purchase and problems of contemporary feminist materialism, this book is written on the cusp of feminist theory of materiality and the analysis of a feminist object – the vaginal microbicide. Vaginal microbicides are female-initiated HIV prevention methods designed as creams, rings, gels and sponges that women can insert vaginally before having sex to protect themselves against HIV infection. At present, vaginal microbicides are being tested in clinical trials and have been since the early 1990s, with mixed results. There is no effective microbicide available to date. In correspondence with its theoretical/empirical balance, the book has two aims: to provide an analysis of the field of microbicide development that is robust enough to articulate the complexity of its promise and material effects – something the field’s own feminist discourse is unable to do; and to utilise the microbicide as an analytical ally in a provocative debate with contemporary materialism, especially confronting its neglect of particularly feminist issues materialising in the world at present.
​
Ultimately, this book argues that there is a fundamental tension between the promise of vaginal microbicides as it initially emerged through women’s health advocacy and the effects of biomedical process that have taken the field to where it stands at present - biomedicalised. This difference matters for the vulnerability of trial participants; this difference matters for the microbicide/woman that emerges from the field as the configuration of its potential user; and this difference matters for feminist theory as a political project.
​
