Artist Victoria Sin discusses desire, identification, agency and strategies of queer resistance with curator and art historian, Kostas Stasinopoulos. This conversation aims to provide an insight into Sin’s practice, focusing on speculative ideas surrounding the body, gender, and methods of decolonisation, using drag as a means of engagement and a practice of purposeful embodiment. They will discuss science fiction as a practice of rewriting patriarchal and colonial narratives, storytelling as a collective practice of resistance, oppressive discourses on states of sexed, gendered and raced bodies, as well as Sin’s wider practice and their visions for the future.
Victoria Sin is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Drawing from close personal encounters of looking and wanting, their work presents heavily constructed fantasy narratives on the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body. Victoria’s recent presentations include: “Age of You”, MOCA, Toronto (CA, 2019); “La vie des chose”, MOMENTA biennale de l’image, Montreal (CA, 2019); Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, London (2019); Display, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund (2019); Meetings on Art, The 58th Venice Biennale, Venice (2019); Rising up in the infinite sky, Sophia Al-Maria: BCE, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Do Disturb, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); PLANTSEX, General Ecology, Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); If I had the words to tell you we wouldn’t be here now, Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei (2019); DRAG, Hayward Gallery, London (2018); The sky as an image, an image as a net, Serpentine Park Nights, London (2018); Swinging Out Over the Earth, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Indifferent Idols, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei (2018); Block Universe, Brunel Museum, London (2018); A View From Elsewhere, Café Oto, London (2018); We Share the Same Tears, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Glitch Feminism, ICA, London (2017); TATE EXCHANGE: GENDER TALKS, Tate Modern, London (2017).
Kostas Stasinopoulos is a curator and art historian. He is Assistant Curator, Live Programmes at Serpentine Galleries, London, and Associate Curator at The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, Greece. Kostas received his PhD in History of Art from University of York (2016) fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Onassis Foundation, NEON Foundation and the Department of History of Art at University of York. He obtained his MA degree in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011, holds an MA in Cultural and Creative Industries from King’s College London, 2008 and graduated with a BSc in Biochemistry with Management from Imperial College London, 2004. He has collaborated with the Whitechapel Gallery, Frieze and White Cube in London and the Athens Biennale in Greece. Previous exhibitions and projects include The Marathon Marathon Project (with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Nadja Argyropoulou, 2010), AWARE: Mona Hatoum, Adela Jušić, Silvia Kolbowski and Paky Vlassopoulou (Syros International Film Festival, 2014), Maria Lassnig: The Future is Invented with Fragments from the Past (with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peter Pakesch and Denys Zacharopoulos, 2016-17) and The Athens Dialogues (with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Karen Marta and DESTE Foundation, 2017). Kostas is also currently a researcher at the Centre of New Media & Feminist Public Practices at the University of Thessaly.
Organised by Dr Wenny Teo (The Courtauld)