Associate research and teaching staff

Diana Georgiou is a writer and curator. She was the founder and co-director of the non-profit arts organisation CUNTemporary (2012-2021). Her recent co-curated project ‘EcoFutures’ (2019) focused on the ongoing ecological and environmental crisis from a queer, feminist and decolonial perspective, drawing together 70 artists, activists and theorists across seven venues with the support of 10 partner organisations.

She has curated exhibitions and public programmes in London for Furtherfield Gallery, ICA, Showroom Gallery, Guest Projects and Peltz Gallery amongst others. Attentive to the sonic resonances of narrative and poetry, her textual work takes the form of recordings and performative live readings. Her debut novel ‘Other Reflexes’ (2022), is forthcoming with Book Works.

Georgiou holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, in which she employed feminist psychoanalytic theories and feminist philosophies to examine the distinction between writing about art and art-writing, as well as the effects that the latter has both on ethics and subjectivity.

Camilla Palestra is a curator and researcher concerned with multidisciplinary and collaborative practices that critically engage with urgent issues of our contemporary society, in connection to the socio-political environment and its diversity.

She has more than fifteen-year experience in curating and developing research-led projects for museums, galleries, higher education institutions, including the Venice Biennale, Fashion Space Gallery, Devi Art Foundation, Royal Academy of Arts London, and MART museum. Camilla has worked on solo exhibitions and commissioned projects with established and emerging artists, including Lucy + Jorge Orta, Shezad Dawood, Rainer Ganhal, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Annie-Marie Akussah, Hanae Utamura, among others. She is currently working as Curatorial Associate at the University of the Arts London.

Camilla is an Associate Lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts and held teaching positions at the London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins (UAL). She received a MA Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Arts London and was awarded the Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Camilla is currently a doctoral researcher in the Advanced Practices programme in the Visual Culture Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

(Communal) Researcher, organiser, curator, and writer invested in the questions on the political aesthetics of self-organisation, namely the tensions between the institutive, the radical, and the communal that drive self-organised resistances. Doctoral researcher and Convenor at the Advanced Practices programme, department of Visual Cultures.

Vaida collectively runs independent spaces, organisations, and assemblies and is Editor-in-Chief and Head of organisation at Artnews. Assistant Editor of a publication, 'Paths to Autonomy' (2022), coming out with Minor Compositions.

Studied painting, then Art History. After a period teaching design history at Birmingham polytechnic, I left to resume art practice, doing sessional teaching at various art schools, including Goldsmiths and Farnham, together with freelance curating and art writing. Devised and organised travelling exhibitions for the Arts Council and South Bank Centre, the last and most significant being Like the Face of the Moon, which set in parallel works of art and scientific illustrations, on the theme of objectivity, ranging over three centuries and drawing on nation-wide museum collections and scientific archives. Joined faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies Dept.,1993, head of Visual Cultures, 2005-2009, retired 2022. My continuing research, begun in the1990s, concerns painting and phenomenology, often with a focus on realism (book, Realism in 2oth Century Painting, pub. 2000), and historically wide-ranging. Invitations to publish and to contribute conference papers have arisen thereby. My current book project, building on published work, has the title Not there, not elsewhere: painting, philosophy and the invention of external reality.

Dr Edward George is a writer, broadcaster, artist and filmmaker. Founder of Black Audio Film Collective, George wrote and presented the ground-breaking science fiction documentary Last Angel of History (1996). George is part of the multimedia duo Flow Motion, and the electronic music group Hallucinator. He also hosts Sound of Music (Threads Radio), Kuduro – Electronic Music of Angola (Counterflows).

George’s series The Strangeness of Dub (Morley Radio) dives into reggae, dub, versions and versioning, drawing on critical theory, social history, and a deep and a wide cross-genre musical selection.Edward George lives and works in London and is currently a research fellow of the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London and KHM, Cologne, Germany in the field of art and media studies.

Maggie Roberts makes work both as an individual and as the collaborative artist and hive mind, 0rphan Drift, currently with tentacles in London, Capetown and San Francisco. She has participated internationally in well over a decade and a half of exhibitions, screenings and performance, mostly as part of 0D, exhibiting extensively in the UK, Europe, Canada and the States, including at the Cabinet Gallery and Tate Modern; writing the Scifi-theory text 'Cyberpositive'; and featuring in DJ Spooky's 'Sound Unbound' in the 'Renegade Academics' chapter.

Maggie has worked between London and  Capetown since 2002, continuing to produce collage, paintings and experimental video, that explore speculative futures and science fictional transformation, exhibiting as 0rphan Drift in London, Sao Paulo, San Francisco, Capetown and Vilnius. Key projects include ‘Syzygy’ and ‘Liquid Lattice’ collaborations with CCRU; AV performances at ‘Thinking Alien’ and ‘Virtual Futures’; ‘Double Walker’, ‘Motion Capture’,‘You Its Eyes’ and ‘A Wilderness Of Elsewheres’ video pieces.

Both her artistic identities are organised by time travel, via climate change, virtual reality and bio-science, manifesting science fictional pathways and arrivals. She produces iterations and investigations in multiple media: collage, video and animation, sound, actions and writing, with a visibly embedded friction between digital and analogue signal, often achieved through remixing and feedback loops between media. The work engages though an amplified tension between the experiential and the speculative, pointing out their material co-existence. 

For the last couple of years she has been researching the aesthetics of hyperobjects and hyperstitions towards ‘GIR’, an 0D project with Ranu Mukherjee.  It is a search for visual and aural forms that can relate the strange, yet common, sense of touching the future in so many surfaces, and of deep changes occurring in front of our eyes. She is also collaborating with Plastique Fantastique on a video performance project, ‘Green Skeen’ which has evolved from ‘GIR’ narratives. 

Other current projects include several exhibitions in London and in Lisbon and Berlin; a book chapter entitled ‘The Things That Knowledge Cannot Eat’, for ‘Fiction As Method’ and new series of multi media works tracing everting virtual worlds. 

merliquify.com

Robin Mackay is director of UK publisher and arts organization Urbanomic, and editor of their journal Collapse. He has written widely on philosophy and contemporary art, and has instigated collaborative projects with numerous contemporary artists. He has also translated a number of important works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, Francois Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography and Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye. 

urbanomic.com