In this new work Nina Wakeford encounters and reworks ‘The Body Multiple’, an iconic ethnographic investigation set in a Dutch university hospital and written by Annemarie Mol in 2002. The short performance-lecture resets this classic study amongst the materials of Johann Arens’ exhibition, and in so doing tries to insert a new kind of object into the space: one which responds to Arens’ challenge to think about the relevance of tactility, both in medicine and sculpture.
Nina Wakeford is an artist and sociologist – trained first in Sociology at the University of Cambridge then the University of Oxford, where she gained a D.Phil in Sociology and began a research and teaching career in the social sciences. She subsequently returned to study and undertook a BFA and MFA at Goldsmiths, and recently completed a practice-led PhD in Fine Art.
She is currently Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London and tutor on the Master of Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. She also teaches on the MA Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her early sociological work was in the field of Science and Technology Studies and included ethnographic investigations of the technosocial environments of the 1990s and she studied the gendered and raced cultures of virtual worlds, from bulletin boards onwards. As an artist Nina makes work that begins with the unfinished business of past social movements, and the challenges of revisiting the energies that these movements created. She is interested in how to enact demands through material engagements, the way in which identification and disidentification are forged, modes of empathy and inhabitation, and the risks of staying loyal/respectful to the kinds of materials that initiate the work. Recently, drawing on a personal collection of feminist materials from the 1970s and 1980s, Nina has made a series of film and performance works that involve singing as a way of attaching herself to objects or images, the first of which was shown at Legion TV in 2014. More recent performances have taken place at BFI, ICA and the Wellcome Collection. She is currently working on a commission for Art on the Underground and in 2019 will produce a work for the Barbican’s season on science-human-machine interactions. Nina is the co-editor of Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social (Routledge, 2012) a collection that explores, amongst other things, how research might better work with openness and ambiguity.
This event is part of P/////AKT’s 2018 exhibition program Extended Matter. More information on the program here.
