Newcastle University

Rachel Garfield’s work focuses on the relationship between the social and political spheres. In the past, with works like You’re Joking 1-4 Garfield has looked at racism and the role of narrativising experience in self making this new work is dealing with some of the big questions that have preoccupied generations straddling the two centuries (20th and 21st). Interviews are the springboard for the work and humour is always an important element, introduced in The Straggle, for example, through Ian Saville The Socialist Magician, while juxtapositions of media imagery and other paraphernalia contextualise the interviews. Drawing on some of the insights in Alain Badiou’s The Century 2005, the new trilogy of videos will raise questions about how we envision the future.

She has exhibited widely, recently in a solo show at Beaconsfield London (2012) and screening work at the ICA as part of the London Short Film Festival (2012). Garfield’s work has been written about recently by Prof Amelia Joes in Seeing Differently, Routledge2012 and by Lisa Bloom “Barbie’s Jewish roots:Jewish Women’s Bodies and Feminist Art” in Jews and Sex, ed. Nathan Abrams, Five Leaves and in Blackwells Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones, Blackwell 2006, featuring in “Implications of Blackness”, Pauline de Souza, Garfield writes about video art and about the modern and contemporary representation of Jews in art and popular media. Recent texts include chapter monograph “Vivienne Dick: A Particular Incoherence” in Between Truth and Fiction, The Films of Vivienne Dick, Treasa O’Brian ed., Crawford Art Centre/Lux.