Forum #8 - Nina Wakeford with Karl Baker

17 Jul 2019

Artist and sociologist Nina Wakeford presents a new, live performance, plus accompanying writing The Historic Trackwalk and We will bolt the jigs to the rail. Alongside Nina selects an excerpt from The Hundreds by Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant, and writer and philosopher Karl Baker joins us in leading the discussion.

Nina Wakeford makes work that begins with unfinished business of past social movements, and the challenges of revisiting the energies that these movements created. She is interested in how to enact demands through material engagements, the way in which identification and disidentification are forged, modes of empathy and inhabitation, and the risks of staying loyal/respectful to the kinds of materials that initiate the work. Recently, drawing on a personal collection of feminist materials from the 1970s and 1980s, Nina has made a series of film and performance works that involve singing as a way of attaching herself to objects or images. Recent performances have been shown at the British Film Institute, Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Wellcome Collection. She is currently working on a commission for Art on the Underground (2018-20). Wakeford’s sociological work focuses on the development of visual sociology through inventive methods and practice-led research. She convenes the MA in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths. – gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/wakeford-nina

Karl Baker is a philosopher and writer, at Central St Martin’s, University of the Arts, London.