The Low-Res Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series resource guides contain upcoming speakers' biographies, articles, video and audio content, related publications in the Flaxman Library, and additional online resources. These guides may be used in preparation for the public lecture, studio visits, and post-lecture discussion.
Rizvana Bradley: Monday, June 16, 6:00–7:30 p.m. CT
SAIC Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley is the author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE. Her art criticism has been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, the Serpentine Galleries, the Stedelijk Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The Difficulty of Black Women (A Response)
Rizvana Bradley I Art Forum I December 20, 2022
On Black Aesthesis*
Rizvana Bradley | Diacritics, vol. 49 (4) | p. 21-53 | 2021
*ARTIC Login Required
Picturing Catastrophe: The Visual Politics of Racial Reckoning
Rizvana Bradley I The Yale Review, vol. 109 (2) I May 25, 2021
Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion*
Rizvana Bradley | TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 62 (1) | p. 14-30 | 2018
Anteaesthetics
by
In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation--an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.
Awaiting Her Verb, Loophole of Retreat: Venice, Day 1 [YouTube]
The 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2022
Introduction: There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude [YouTube]
Rizvana Bradley, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2018
To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch [YouTube]
Hortense Spillers and Rizvana Bradley, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2018