Works in Progress

“Parties, Portfolios, and the Occasional Egg: EIGEN+ART and Creative Dissent in the Late East Germany,” Creative Dissent: Alternative Cultures during Socialism and Beyond, 1945 – 1991, edited by Katalin Cseh-Varga, Martin Klimke, Rolf Werenskjold, and Marko Zubak. Central European University Press (expected publication date 2025)

“BITTERFELD IS EVERYWHERE. An Archive of Waste in the Socialist and Post-Socialist Industrial Landscape,” From Utopian Modeling to Necropolitical Agonism: Contemporary European Art at a Time of Democratic Crisis, edited by Lindsay Caplan and Kerry Greaves. University of Manchester Press (expected publication date 2025).

Monograph on the art and visual culture of the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. Currently being researched while a faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

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Project abstract: 

We make sense of our lives through creative action as a means of connection. Art does not just serve a function; it is a function of human existence. These are the premises of “Slow Time, Small Talk, Big Network: The Art and Visual Culture of the Riot Grrrl Movement.” Conceived as a book-length work, the project uses case studies of zines, experimental video, fashion and snapshot photography made by fans, artists, and musicians as part of the cultural movement that redefined feminism across the US in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Riot Grrrl movement excelled in its capacity to network young people living in American suburbs, producing a national exchange that prepared the conditions for today’s more capacious and intersectional definitions of gender, sexuality, and race. The art and visual culture of the movement, moreover, reveal the power of a self-generating audience to produce and sustain a subculture.

While a faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at UMTC, I will conduct field research into Twin Cities manifestations of Riot Grrrl. I will wed local examples to ones further afield to demonstrate how not only political and social cohesion but material and methodological continuities strengthened the movement. In this way, “Slow Time, Small Talk, Big Network” can demonstrate how Riot Grrrl functioned as a kind of virtual and physical hybrid, a union that explains its breadth, while also allowing it to serve as an example for how cultural alternatives to the status quo may take shape today.