This is a past event
"Brexit and the Occult: Gendered Ghosts of Empire" with Dr Edwin Coomasaru
Since the EU referendum Leavers and Remainers have increasingly used occult metaphors to attack each other, as they decry the UK’s drift into ‘uncharted waters’ or descent into ‘tribalism’. How might gender and race shape this current crisis of British identity? In 2017 Rita Duffy created Soften the Border, an installation of hand-knitted votive dolls on the Northern Irish-Irish border. In 2018 Project O exhibited Saved at London’s Somerset House, a video depicting women of colour performing magical rituals in a post-apocalyptic watery wasteland. What might these artworks tell us about the ways in which magic has long been weaponised by patriarchal white supremacy, as well as the ways in which the supernatural has also been used as a form of political resistance? Soften the Border and Saved offer an image of a UK no longer ruling the waves, unable to ‘take back control’ and haunted by ghosts of empire.
Dr Edwin Coomasaru is a historian of modern and contemporary art. He has previously held Postdoctoral and Research Continuity Fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre (2020-22) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (2018-19), where he was also awarded his PhD in 2018. In 2021 he also worked as a Freelance Research Assistant on an anti-racist and decolonial resource portal for the Association of Art History. He co-convenes the Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group, and is currently co-editing a book on Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times for Courtauld Books Online. He has contributed to Third Text, British Art Studies, Oxford Art Journal, The Irish Times, Irish Studies Review, The Irish Review, Photoworks Annual, Burlington Contemporary, Architectural Review, Source Magazine, and the Barbican’s Masculinities (2020) exhibition catalogue.
This event will be held online, via Microsoft Teams. If you wish to attend, please email Dr Karl Kinsella, karl.kinsella@abdn.ac.uk to receive the link to join us.