Josephine Berry of the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication is launching her first solo-authored book.
Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art’s drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state’s biologized control of life.
The author explores how art’s ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower’s aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life—rendering it bare. In these intersecting yet different orientations toward life, the book finds the answer to the question: How did autonomous art become such an effective tool of the capitalist state?
Published by Sternberg Press, the book’s launch event will take place in the convivial setting of The Word independent bookshop, in New Cross.
There will be drinks, nibbles and a short talk. Books will also be on sale at a 20% discount.
Praise for Art and (Bare) Life:
“The millennial body of the human is a territory marked by sacred codes, disciplines, and abstractions. To the technologies of biopower Josephine Berry waves the Medusa head of the art of rebellion.”
—Matteo Pasquinelli, Professor in Media Theory, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design