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Dr. TJ Demos

Reader Modern and contemporary art Email: tj.demos@ucl.ac.uk

T.J. Demos writes widely on modern and contemporary art and his essays have appeared in journals including Grey Room and October. He is also a critic, writing for magazines such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Art Press. His published work centers broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant conventions, whether representational, aesthetic, or social and political. His books include: The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007), which places Duchamp’s installations and mixed-media projects - including his “portable museum,” La Boîte-en-valise - in relation to geopolitical and aesthetic displacement during the early twentieth century’s periods of world war and nationalism; and Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (MIT Press/Afterall Books, 2010), which examines Birnbaum's art practice in relation to postmodernist appropriation, media analysis, and feminist politics, and explores the artist's pioneering attempts to open up the transformative capacities of video as a medium.

T.J. Demos’ current work focuses on contemporary art, investigating in particular the diverse ways that artists have negotiated the recently emerging conjunction of political sovereignty and statelessness. He is presently completing two book projects: the first, provisionally titled The Migrant Image: The Politics of Documentary Art During Global Crisis (Duke University Press), explores the relation of contemporary art--including practices from North America, Europe, and the Middle East--to the experience of social dislocation and political crisis, where art figures in ways both critically analytical and creatively emancipating; the second, entitled Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press), addresses the recent returns of select artists to former colonial states in Sub-Saharan Africa and the resulting art--predominantly photography and film--that investigates postcolonial conditions. Attendant to developments in poststructural and postcolonial theory, his present research considers new ways of comprehending photographic and video-based practice, contemporary art and the politics of ecology, socially-engaged art, and the recent restructurings of art institutions. He is interested in supervising research in these and other areas.

Current PhD students:

Paula Brailovsky, Collective Approaches to 'Border Art': 1984-2005.

Maja Fowkes, Art and Environment in Central Europe During the 1960s and 1970s.

Denise Frimer, The Art of Education: On the Engineering of Social Relations in Biennials and Museums, 1997-2007.

Paolo Magagnoli, Reclaiming the Past: Historical Representation in Contemporary Photography and Video Art.

Irene Montero Sabin, Critical Contemporary Art Responses to the War on Terror in Thematic Exhibitions, Biennials, and Publications

Ted McDonald-Toone, Curating Cultural Location: Exhibitions and the Reception of Contemporary Art from the Middle East and North Africa.

Lauren Rotenberg, Contemporary Art's Economy of Immaterial Production.

Recent publications of T.J. Demos: • "Art After Nature: The Post-Natural Condition," Artforum (April 2012), 191-97. [pdf] • “Toward a New Institutional Critique: A Conversation with Renzo Martens,” Atlántica 52 (2012), 90-103. [pdf] • “‘A Form of Total Disobedience’: The Art of Rossella Biscotti,” in Rossella Biscotti (Rome: MAXXI – Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, 2012), 11-15. [pdf] • “Zarina Bhimji’s Cinema of Affect,” in Zarina Bhimji (London: Whitechapel, 2011), 11-29. [pdf] • “Sven Augustijnen’s Spectropoetics,” in Sven Augustijnen: Spectres (Brussels: Wiels, 2011). [pdf] • “Photography’s (Post)Humanist Interventions: Or, Can Photography Make the World More Liveable?” 4th Fotofestival: Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg (Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, and Heidelberg, 2011), 191-198. [pdf] • “Poverty Pornography, Humanitarianism, and Neoliberal Globalization: Notes on Some Paradoxes in Contemporary Art,” (on Renzo Martens' Episode III: Enjoy Poverty) Stedelijk Bureau Newsletter 121 (April 2011). [pdf] • “The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology,” Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2009. [pdf] Further publications...