Sarah Charalambides
Sarah Charalambides: I'm a graphic designer, teacher and researcher. I received my BDes in Graphic Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and have been working as a freelance graphic designer in and around the field of modern and contemporary art. During my BA in Art History at the University of Amsterdam, I was introduced to forms of academic research on the object and notion of art. To further develop my studies I pursued an MRes in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, combining the study of contemporary art practice with critical theory, philosophy and cultural studies. In 2014 I enrolled on the PhD in Visual Cultures, working on a project working-titled ‘Self-Precarisation and Becoming Common’. I'm an associate lecturer in the department, teach Visual Arts at Buitenkunst in the Netherlands and work as a content manager and editor for projects that include Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, Tsarino Foundation and PaperWork Magazine.
Research project: In the current conditions of governance, cultural producers seem to willingly subordinate themselves to the dispositions of power, by aligning to the neoliberal model of labour through the adoption of entrepreneurial self-practices. The strong desires for freedom and autonomy driving those who work freelance or self-employed can lead to a process of subjectivation that political theorist Isabell Lorey has called ‘self-precarisation’. My PhD explores how this highly ambivalent notion is debated and negotiated through Kamera Läuft! (Rolling!), a video project made in 2004 by the Berlin-based feminist research and activist group kleines postfordistisches Drama (small post-Fordist drama). Situating the everyday lived experiences of cultural producers in a mediatised public sphere, kpD problematises the possibilities for critical agency and collective resistance under the conscious and voluntary acceptance of precarious labour in the 21st century. Comparing kpD’s radically open-ended methodology with other feminist cultural practices that provoke discussions about common precarisation – such as Helke Sander’s film Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit: Redupers (The All-round Reduced Personality: Redupers) (1977), Precarias a la Deriva’s publication and video project A la Deriva, Por los Circuitos de la Precariedad Femenina (Adrift Through the Circuits of Feminised Precarious Work) (2002), and Tatjana Turanskyj’s Eine flexible Frau (The Drifters) (2010) – I investigate to what extent self-precarisation challenges dichotomous distinctions between the individual ‘I’ and the collective ‘we’, in order to create new socio-political alliances between precarious subjectivities in fragmented and individualising societies.
Research interests: Aesthetics and ethics of the precarious; (histories of) feminist theory and practice in modern and contemporary art; methods of militant research, situated knowledge, non-hierarchical, collaborative and participatory modes of art and knowledge production; relationships between micro- and macro-politics in contemporary culture; notions of (self-)precarisation and the feminisation of labour in neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism; the coming together of art and activism around issues of subjectivation, (self-)care and reproduction; theories and politics of identity, re/presentation, in/visibility, intersectionality, institutional critique and globalisation within the fields of art history and visual culture.