Researcher-in-Residence
From left to right: Chemin du Montparnasse, © Margot Montigny/AWARE; Portrait of Amelia Groom, © Amelia Groom; Design by Lisa Sturacci studio, © AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibition
As part of the residency program for research on women and non-binary photographers and video artists, AWARE will welcome art writer and scholar Amelia Groom to the Villa Vassilieff, from January to April 2025.
During this residency, Amelia Groom will be looking at the work of the French avant-garde artists and antifascist activists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Since the posthumous discovery of their photographic oeuvre, C. Cahun and M. Moore have become iconic as queer and trans ancestors. While the spotlight of scholarly attention over recent decades has tended to fall on the couple’s indoor costumed portraits, A. Groom’s project looks instead to the many outdoor images made by the artists on Jersey Island – while also tending to threads of environmental thought in C. Cahun’s writing. What happens to their embodied critiques of modern individuated human subjecthood, and its attendant binary gender system, when we follow these artists outside and encounter their work through an expanded ecology? How does their gender expansiveness develop through playful experiments in ecological monstrosities that disrupt normative figure/ground distinctions – and how might this also relate to unsettling the environmentally catastrophic European colonial-capitalist project of denying the non-separation of human life from the land? In what ways can C. Cahun and M. Moore’s deep contempt for ideologies of purity and originality outline a refusal of ecofascist thought (in both its twentieth-century iterations and its more recent revivals)? What did cats teach these artists about the values of refusal and stealthiness? And what about the sea, that continually shapeshifting entity they looked onto from their beachfront home? How might the metamorphosing effects of the tides be understood in relation to the capacity, and the exuberant need, for transformation – which was so central to C. Cahun and M. Moore’s aesthetics and politics? These are some of the questions that are shape(shifting) this interdisciplinary project, which undertakes archival research while listening for the resonance of C. Cahun and M. Moore’s work in the catastrophic present.
Amelia Groom is an art writer and scholar who is currently working on a book that looks at the art and antifascist activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore through the lenses of queer and trans ecologies. Groom completed a PhD in art history and theory at the University of Sydney in 2014 and has since been awarded postdoctoral research fellowships at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, and at ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin. As part of the Afterall One Work series, Groom published a book on the Marsh Ruins (1981), a swampy environmental sculpture by the artist Beverly Buchanan, who made secretive and ruinous monuments to Black history in the Deep South. Groom’s research on Buchanan was supported by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. She has recently published texts on topics including Mariah Carey’s refusal to acknowledge time; Sergei Eisenstein’s sex drawings; mud and decolonial ecologies; Scheherazade and the possibilities of “oblique parrhesia”; and queer, feminist and antiracist practices of gossip and “grapevine epistemologies.” Groom co-edited the online journal No Linear Fucking Time (published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht), and their research has often returned to questions of time: its undercurrents, its blockages and trickling detours, and the possibilities for its re-routing.
The external members of the selection committee were:
Dr Flora Dunster is a Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, where she is Course Leader of MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies. She works on histories of queer and lesbian photography in the United Kingdom. With Theo Gordon, she is co-author of Photography–A Queer History (Octopus/Ilex, 2024). With Gordon, Fiona Anderson and Laura Guy she is co-editor of “Queer Art in Britain Since the 1980s,” a forthcoming special issue of British Art Studies. Recent writing can be found in Third Text, The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies, and Resist, Organise, Build: Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States during the Long 1980s.
Dr. Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss is a cultural and media theorist, scholar, and curator. She works at the intersections of feminist and anticolonial art, political practices, digital technologies, and narratives of human and non-human subjectivity. Recent publications include “Myths of Accuracy” in BOM Magazine (HKW and Archive books, 2024) and the monograph Feminist Solidarities after Modulation (available OA at punctum.press, 2023). Sara is a curator at Haus der Kutluren der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, on the board of diffrakt. centre for theoretical peripherie and an editor at kritisch-lesen.de
Dr. Taous Dahmani (she/her) is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator specializing in photography. Dahmani curated the 2022 Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. In October 2024, she curated two themed group exhibitions at the Jaou Photo Biennale in Tunis, Tunisia. The following month, she unveiled a solo exhibition of SMITH at NOUA in Bodø, Norway. For FEP, she is curating ‘Anastasia Samoylova: Adaptation’ at the Saatchi Gallery. Her writing is featured in photobooks published by Loose Joints, Textuel and Chose Commune, as well as in magazines like The British Journal of Photography, FOAM, GQ, Aperture, Camera Austria and 1000 Words Magazine. She is the associate editor of Shining Lights. Black women Photographers in 1980’s-90’s Britain (MACK/Autograph ABP, 2024). She joined LCC (UAL) as an Associate Lecturer in January 2023.
This residency received the support of Fondation d’entreprise Neuflize OBC.
