About

I joined the department in 2019. Before that, I was a visiting research scholar at CUNY Graduate Center in New York and a research fellow in History of Art at UCL, supported by the Swiss Research Council. During my PhD at the University of Oxford (completed in 2018), I was based at the Ruskin School of Art. Working closely with artists led me to co-found the journal OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform in 2016. In 2017, I was a Franz Roh Fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. As an undergraduate, I studied archaeology and art history at the Sorbonne in Paris, following a foundation art degree at ECAL in Lausanne, where I majored in video and filmmaking.

My current project, the book manuscript Inventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and the Moving Image of Social Life, examines the boundaries between representing and producing new rituals in recent art practices. The book focuses on work by Mike Kelley, Pierre Huyghe, Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch together with cases in early-modern painting, visual ethnography, and homemade video practices online. It argues that the mechanisms by which new rituals are being born have fully merged with contemporary mechanisms of representation.

A new project I am working on will address the expansion of moving-image tropes, genres and scenarios into everyday life, studied through the lens of contemporary practices in art and film. How do social ideals of reality, formally established alongside the history of moving image, develop in the so-called post-truth age? Other subjects I have written about include the work of Steve McQueen in relation to marginalised narratives and memorial forms, French banlieue cinema in the wake of the country’s council estate ‘riots’, outsider art, and postcolonial ritual performance in Britain.