Join author and curator Legacy Russell and the Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist on Instagram Live (at 7pm GMT) as they discuss becoming your avatar, glitch as resistance and the radical, emancipatory potential of the internet.
Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The glitch announces: One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.
Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto unfurls a new kind of cyberfeminism that centres queer, trans and nonbinary and in doing so asks: can we free ourselves from our bodies? In a radical call to arms, Russell argues that we need to embrace the glitch in order to break down the binaries and limitations that define gender, race, sexuality. In an urgent manifesto, Russell reveals the many ways that “the glitch” performs and transforms: how it refuses, throws shade, ghosts, encrypts, mobilises and survives. Developing the argument through memoir, art and critical theory, Russell also looks at the work of contemporary artists who travel through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how an error can be a revolution.
Organised in collaboration with Verso Books.
We will be uploading a closed captioned recording of this talk following tonight’s Instagram Live.
About Legacy Russell
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. Curated exhibitions and projects include LEAN (2020) featuring Justin Allen, Jen Everett, Devin Kenny, Kalup Linzy, Rene Matić, Sadé Mica, and Leilah Weinraub for Performa’s Radical Broadcast; This Longing Vessel : Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019-20 featuring E. Jane, Elliot Reed, and Naudline Pierre (2020); Projects: Garrett Bradley (2020) and Projects 110 : Michael Armitage (2019), organized with Thelma Golden and The Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA; Dozie Kanu : Function (2019), Chloë Bass : Wayfinding (2019), and Radical Reading Room (2019) at The Studio Museum in Harlem. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is published by Verso Books. Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.
