Misha Gafarova

This practice-based research project speaks to the queer body and its ongoing struggle with representation: a body continually negotiating the competing demands of visibility and resistance. The project explores this paradox, which remains at the heart of queer politics, through an interplay of performance and writing, and does so in the context of contemporary art. It speaks from a sphere of art that today represents a vast knowledge economy (Holert, 2020), within which questions of visibility for marginalised bodies feel increasingly complex; where queer subjects are nominally welcome but structurally and geopolitically excluded.

This project responds through a series of artworks that trouble their own visibility and lean towards the domain of life. These begin as performances in the public realm but transform into writing - a process through which performance is re-imagined as generative rather than representational. In doing so, I explore the mutual concerns of queer politics and embodied art practices, grasping the former in material and embodied terms. Further, I use this investigation to speak back to queer theories in their recent turn to affect, sense and sensation, situating the body as an actant within, rather than simply a template for, knowledge.