Alexandra joined Middlesex as Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture in 2013; she is also Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), University of Johannesburg. An art historian and theorist originally trained in comparative literature, she researches the aesthetic mobilisation of discomfort to political ends, focusing on art practices informed by and committed to feminism, the fraught but fertile relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis, death, mourning and shame. She curated ‘Burnt Breakfast’ and other works by Su Richardson (Goldsmiths, 2012) and, with Basia Sliwinska, Home Strike (l'étrangère, 2018), and has published widely on feminism, art and visual culture in journals including Art Journal, Women and Performance, n.paradoxa, Performance Research, Oxford Art Journal and Hypatia. Her books include The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016); and (as editor) Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference (2008); and The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller, 1977-2007 (2008).
QUALIFICATIONS
Greek, French, German (basic).
Critical approaches to visual culture; contemporary art practice in historical, critical and philosophical contexts; art and/as social practice; art and society; art movements; art and writing; practice as research; guidance and support of independent study at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level.
RESEARCH
Alexandra Kokoli's research is situated within feminist art history, theory and practice, focusing particularly on the fraught but fertile relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis. She works with and on contemporary artists including Susan Hiller, Monica Ross and Judy Chicago and has a developing curatorial practice that builds on her research on the gender implications of curatorial strategies.
PUBLICATIONS (SELECTED)
[See also: http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/view/creators/Kokoli=3AAlexandra_M=2E=3A=3A.html & https://mdx.academia.edu/AlexandraKokoli]
Authored Books
The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016; paperback 2017) ISBN 9781472505583 [Review: Amy Tobin, 'Homesickness', Oxford Art Journal (2017) 40 (1): 199-203. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx013]
Tate in Focus: Susan Hiller’s From the Freud Museum, with a contribution from Joanne Morra, (Tate Research, 2017) ISBN 978-1-84976-532-9, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/from-the-freud-museum-susan-hiller
Articles in Peer-reviewed Journals
‘Undoing “homeliness” in feminist art: Feministo: Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife (1975-7)’, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, vol. 13: Domestic Politics (Jan. 2004), pp. 75-83.
‘On Probation: “Tracey Emin” as Sign’, Wasafiri, vol. 25, no. 1 (March 2010), pp. 33-40.
‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Anniversary – An Act of Memory by Monica Ross and Co-Recitors (2008-)’, Performance Research, vol. 17, no. 5 (2012) ‘On Duration’, pp. 24-30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.728436
‘The voice as uncanny index in Susan Hiller’s The Last Silent Movie’, The Art Journal, vol. 72, no. 2 (summer 2013), pp. 6-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2013.10791027
‘“Not a straight line by a spiral”: charting continuity and change in textiles informed by feminism’, Image & Text, no. 23 (2014), pp. 110-129. http://www.imageandtext.up.ac.za/images/files/issue23/23_2014_not_a_straight_line_by_a_spiral_charting_continuity_and_change_in_textiles_informed_by_feminism.pdf
[co-authored with Aaron Winter], ‘What a girl’s gotta do: The labour of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 25, no. 2 (2015), pp. 157-174. DOI:10.1080/0740770X.2015.1057015
‘Pre-emptive Mourning Against the Bomb: Exploded Domesticities in Art Informed by Feminism and Anti-Nuclear Activism’, Oxford Art Journal, 40:1, 2017, pp. 153-168. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx004
‘Free Lunch with the Stench Wench: Towards a Synaesthetics of Poverty and Shame in Catherine Hoffmann’s performance’, Hypatia, special issue Gender & the Politics of Shame, 33:3. Early view online publication Jan 2018. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12399
Chapters in Books
‘The “woman artist” as curatorial effect’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (eds.), Politics in a Glass Case: Exhibiting Women’s and Feminist Art (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 187-204.
‘Angry Melancholia: Towards a Performative Politics of Time in the Work of Monica Ross’, in Susan Hiller and Suzanne Treister (eds.), Monica Ross-Ethical Actions: A Critical Fine Art Practice (Sternberg Press, 2016), pp. 22-31.
Edited Books
M. Kokoli (ed.), Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); electronic edition available. [Reviewed in The Art Book, vol. 16, no. 4 (November 2009), p. 40]
Susan Hiller, The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Texts and Interviews, 1977-2007, edited, introduced and annotated by A. M. Kokoli (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2009).
Curatorial
PhD supervision
Applications for humanities or practice-led PhD research are welcome in areas including but notlimited to: the interfaces of contemporary art practice and critical theory (practice as theory/ theoryas practice); art practice and theory informed by feminism; post-/decolonial art practices and theories; contemporary art and psychoanalysis; contemporary art and its audiences; contemporary art in cultural and social contexts.
COMPLETED PROJECTS
Kokoli, Alexandra M. (2023) Greenham Common’s archival webs: towards a virtual feminist museum. British Art Studies (24). (Accepted/In press)
Kokoli, Alexandra M. (2023) Care, Aftercare, and the Work of Transmission: Learning from Greenham Common. In: Curating with Care. Krasny, Elke and Perry, Lara , eds. Routledge, pp. 117-130. ISBN 9781032069913 (Published online first)
Kokoli, Alexandra M. (2022) The Imaginary of Greenham Common. In: The Imaginary of Greenham Common, 20 August 2022, Beaconsfield, 22 Newport Street, Vauxhall, London SE11 6AY.
Kokoli, Alexandra M. (2022) EPISODE 163 Alexandra Kokoli: Gender, shame & visual cultures. The Surviving Society Podcast. [Audio]
Walsh, Maria and Kokoli, Alexandra M. (2022) Trauma and repair in the museum: an introduction. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society . ISSN 1088-0763 (Published online first)
Peer-review of monograph proposals for Ashgate and Berg/Bloomsbury Academic.
Article peer-review for journals including Third Text, Feminist Media Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Enquire and Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation.
External assessor for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Aberdeen Visual Arts Awards, selection panellist, March 2010.
Gray's School of Art representative, Cultural Forum for the development of an Arts, Heritage and Culture Strategy for Aberdeen 2009/2014 (2009-2010).
