Inga Fraser is a specialist in modern art and intermedia, especially artists’ engagement with film and photography. Her doctoral thesis investigates the contemporary rubric of artists’ moving image in relation to the earlier integration of lens and time-based practices within modern art and its discourses in the first half of the twentieth century.
She joined the Courtauld in the 2021/22 academic year, having previously held curatorial positions at Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and Fashion in Film at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She has contributed essays to journals including British Art Studies, Sculpture Journal and Costume, edited volumes published by Koenig and Ashgate, and exhibition catalogues published by Tate and the National Portrait Gallery.
Inga has spoken at conferences organised by ICOM, the Paul Mellon Centre, the Association for Art History, the British Association for Modernist Studies, the Henry Moore Institute and the Modern Interiors Research Centre. In 2015 she was awarded a Mobius Fellowship and in 2013 she was awarded a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant.
Publications
‘Seton, Marie (1910–1985)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
‘Encounters: Derek Boshier and Film’ in Helen Little (ed.), Derek Boshier (London: Lund Humphries, forthcoming)
‘Alia Syed’s Wallpaper: ‘the agreement of deviations’’ in Maria Palacios Cruz (ed.), Alia Syed (Ghent: Courtisane, 2023)
‘Barry, Iris (1895–1969)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2022)
‘Colour and Kinesis: Len Lye’s films’, Tate Etc., no. 48, Spring 2020
‘From a sheet of paper to the sky’, British Art Studies, no. 7, Autumn 2017
‘Visual Culture’, Year’s Work in Critical Cultural Theory, Vol. 25, 2017
‘Kinomuseum? Film and Video at the Tate Gallery: the Rushes of a Relationship’, lux.org.uk, Nov 2016
‘From the Surreal to the Decorative’, Tate Etc. no. 38, Autumn 2016
‘From a sheet of paper to the sky: Pattern in the work of Paul Nash’ in Emma Chambers (ed.) Paul Nash (Tate Publishing, 2016)
‘Visual Culture’ (with Sophie Oliver), Year’s Work in Critical Cultural Theory, Vol. 24, 2016
‘Media and Movement: Barbara Hepworth beyond the Lens’ in Penelope Curtis and Chris Stephens (eds.) Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World (Tate Publishing, 2015)
‘Hepworth, Film and Photography’, Tate Etc, no. 34, Summer 2015
‘The English Independents: some twentieth-century women carvers’, Sculpture Journal, vol. 23, no. 3, November 2014
‘Tree, Iris (1897–1968)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2014)
‘Innovation in Portraiture’, in Tarnya Cooper (ed.), National Portrait Gallery: A Portrait of Britain (National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2014)
‘Born Fully Clothed: The Significance of Costume for the Silent Cinema Vamp’ in Marketa Uhlirova (ed.) Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (Koenig, 2014)
‘Body, Room, Photograph: Negotiating identity in the self-portraits of Lady Ottoline Morrell’ in Penny Sparke and Anne Massey (eds.) Biography, Identity and the Modern Interior (Ashgate, 2013)
Review: Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer, Seeing Gertrude Stein (2011) for Costume, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013
Selected Papers and Talks
November 2022 — ‘Re-animating a kinetic work held in frame; using art historical research, source material and realia to inform the remaking and re-enactment of a kinetic collage’ (with Charity Fox), The 9th Interim Meeting of the ICOM-CC ATSR Working Group: The Artists’ Gestures and Skills Explored Through Art Technological Source Research, Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Paris
Nov 2022 — ‘Herbert Read and the Cinema: Experiments in Counterpoint’, New Approaches to Herbert Read, Leeds University and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
June 2022 — ‘Oswell Blakeston: the ‘Magic Aftermath’’, Liquid, Crystal Concrete, Paul Mellon Centre, London
April 2021 — ‘‘The Art of the Screen’: George Pearson, Edward Carrick and the role of the artist in British cinema’, Association for Art History Annual Conference
June 2019 — ‘Bauhaus Film’, Troublesome Modernisms: British Association of Modernist Studies Annual Conference, King’s College London
January 2018 — ‘In conversation: Alia Syed’, LUX, London
March 2017 — ‘After Reel Time’ (with Alistair O’Neill), Fashion in Film Festival: Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London
April 2016 — ‘Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World’, Oxford Literary Festival
October 2015 — ‘Moving Modernism: Iconophilia, Iconoclasm and Iconophobia’, Artists’ Moving Image Practice in Britain: From 1990 to today: conference at Whitechapel Gallery, London
July 2015 — ‘Barbara Hepworth: Figure and Representation’, National Portrait Gallery, London
July 2015 — ‘Barbara Hepworth: Archive to Exhibition’, Barbara Hepworth: Life and Selected Archives: symposium at National Archives, Kew, London
July 2013 — ‘Drawing as Document’, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham
December 2012 — ‘On Paper: Portraits of Writers’, National Portrait Gallery, London
May 2011 — ‘Early Film/ Fashion Film’, Videofestival: Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre
April 2011 — ‘Introduction to Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female’, the Museum of the Moving Image, New York
December 2010 — ‘Introduction to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Affairs of Anatol’, BFI Southbank, London
May 2010 — ‘Body, Room, Photograph’, Interior Lives: Modern Interiors Research Centre Conference, Kingston University, London
September 2009 — ‘The Fashion Object’, The Art of Fashion: symposium organised by Premsela, ArtEZ and the Arnhem Academy of Art, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
