Forum #13 - Elly Clarke with Keith Jarrett

18 Mar 2020

This forum will be held on Zoom due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst this is not our usual format for a conversation, which is usually informed by a certain kind of co-presence in a room, as Elly’s work explores the digital body we are hoping that this will add a further experiential dimension as we find ourselves transformed into data through zoom. We hope the potential trickiness of communicating in this way will inform the discussion. Artist and PhD researcher Elly Clarke (Goldsmiths) will present new writing. Poet, fiction writer and educator Keith Jarrett (University of London) joins as respondent.

Elly Clarke is an artist interested in the role, performance and value of the body in a digitally-mediated world, which she explores through video, photography, music, writing & community-based projects and #Sergina – a networked, border-straddling drag queen who, across one body and several, sings and performs songs online and offline about love, lust and loneliness in the mesh of hyper-dis/connection. Some of these songs make it onto records released by Berlin-based record label Wicked Hag. She is a second year CHASE funded PhD researcher in Art at Goldsmiths. – ellyclarke.com

Keith Jarrett is a writer, performer and educator. UK poetry slam champion and Rio International Poetry Slam Winner, his work has included bilingual performances in Bilbao and Madrid, in addition to UK-wide commissions, from arts institutions to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Houses of Parliament. His play, Safest Spot in Town, was aired on BBC Four. Keith was selected for the International Literary Showcase by Val McDermid as one of 10 most outstanding LGBT writers in the UK. Having recently completed his PhD at Birkbeck University, Keith is finishing his first novel. Selah, his poetry collection, was published in 2017.