OLD WORK AND NEW at HAMILTON MAS, FELIXSTOWE - AUGUST 2021
FILM BY ROUX MALHERBE OF ELLY CLARKE TALKING ABOUT HER FINAL INSTALLATION AT HAMILTON MAS, AUGUST 2021
Research Residency - July-October 2021
Text as displayed with the work:
Elly Clarke (born London, 1976) is a photographer, performer and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths College, where she also teaches. For three months Elly is on placement at Hamilton MAS, undertaking practice led research with support from CHASE Doctoral Training Programme.
For the remainder of August, Elly will be using Hamilton MAS as a working project space – installing and performing works and traces of works to create new dialogues between them. Elly is interested in what she understands as the performance and burden (in other words ‘the drag’) of the physical body in an increasingly digitally mediated world. Her drag alter ego #Sergina, who emerged out of parties in Berlin in 2009 and entered Clarke’s work a few years later, is a multi-bodied, border-straddling drag queen who, sings and performs songs online and offline about love, lust and loneliness in the mesh of hyper-dis/connection. Entitled ‘Is My Body Out of Date? The Drag of Physicality in the Digital Age’, Clarke’s PhD proposes drag as a mode and method of resistance to the tracking and tracing of legal identities in a capitalist surveillance context.
Detail of Birmingham / Berlin 8th May 2011 - Hand printed C-Print from 35mm negative from .png screengrab taken during Skype call with Linda Franke. From Conversational Traces, 2008-14.
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