In Watershed, Linda Stupart maps the River Cole in Birmingham UK, through foraging, dyeing
and walking its length. After the Ice, the Deluge is a long-term practice-based project, figuring relationships between the
melting Arctic polar ice caps and other traumatised, abject, alien, and outsider bodies via embodied reframings of horror
and science-fiction tropes of ancient viruses emerging from ice. Starting from a screening of the short films that evolved
from these projects as well as the documentation of their recent work Scum, Linda Stupart will talk about vulnerability as
queer performance strategy and the notion of survival: The survivor figure is important in that it allows us to share
stories of abuse while pointing to the resilience of women, queers, trans folk, and so on; however, these stories and the
voices that tell them also demand that women, queers, trans folk no longer should be traumatised, broken, fragmented time-travellers,
but rather whole and healed individuals under capitalism. In the light of current ecological crises, Linda Stupart proposes
practices of intimacies towards new empathetic possibilities for living ethically in death worlds (e. g. as in the AIDS crisis)
and sick worlds (as with chronically ill bodies); queering the question of survival towards less boundaried ways of being
in crisis.
Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa. They
completed their PhD at Goldsmiths in 2016, with a project engaged in new considerations of objectification and abjection.
They are interested in the possibilities for writing and making discrete grounded encounters with different kinds of bodies
(of knowledge, objects, affect as well as corporeal bodies) as a way to think through less alienated ways of living and thinking
together. This comes out of encounters with feminist art, postcolonial, ecological, queer, and affect theory as well as embodied
and object-based critical institutional encounters at the University of Cape Town.
Her solo exhibitions include
and then, a harrowing at Wysing Arts Centre (2021), I Want to Show You a Body in Tate Britain’s Learning Gallery, where she
also had a residency in 2017, and A Dead Writer Exists in Words and Language is a Type of Virus at Arcadia Missa in London
(2016). In 2019 she produced the theatre All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long (with Carl Gent) at the The Institute of
Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. Recently she took part in several group exhibitions, for example Hexen! Über Körper, Wissen
und Macht at Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg (2023–2024) and The Horror Show at Somerset House in London (2022–2023). In
2017 she curated DEEP ANGER TRUE LOVE TENDER CARE at the Horse Hospital in London and in 2007 FINDING UCT: Narratives, New
and Old in the UCT Permanent Collection at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for African Studies Gallery (with Clare Butcher).
Julia Grillmayr is a visiting professor of cultural studies at the Art University Linz, Austria (Kunstuniversität
Linz). Her key research areas are science fiction cultures and environmental humanities. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature
from the University of Vienna and currently writes a book with the working title “Science Fiction Futurologies”. Together
with Christina Gruber and Sophia Rut she forms the artistic research collective “Lobau Listening Comprehensions” and, in this
context, has been awarded the Theodor Körner Preis 2023.
This event takes place in connection with the IFK
conference
Überleben, which will be held from October 23 to
25, 2024 at the University of Arts Linz.
https://www.radicalmatter.art/events/survival
