Julie Gemuend
Hypersensitivity in the Anthropocene: Material Flows and Currents of Sensory Awareness
My doctoral research-creation project, which will take the form of a performance-based video installation, engages the hypersensitive body as an imaginative intervention that figures embodiment as porous, co-composed, infected and infectious. In my work I aim to articulate and elaborate a material conception of the human as contaminated by otherness and thus inseparable from the environment. Serving as an implication of the crumbling sustainability of Western liberal humanism and its autonomous, self-contained notion of the human, hypersensitive bodies possess a prophetic awareness of the "trans-corporeal" movements which make and unmake us.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity P, 2013.
Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Polity P, 2019.
Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World. Duke UP, 2019.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP, 2012.
Julie Gemuend is a Canadian artist. Her academic background consists of an undergraduate degree in visual arts, an MFA in documentary media, and she is currently completing her PhD in interdisciplinary studies at Brock University. Her practice is aligned with a number of intersecting movements that emerged in the 1960s, including performance-based video, body art, and land art. In her work, Gemuend aims to explore our profound connection with the natural world by probing the edges of identity and environment, interiority and exteriority, and the places where the two merge. She employs her body to speculate on theories concerning the self and materiality within the context of the human body and its relationship with the physical world. Gemuend is a recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Production Grant, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Scholarship and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship awards.
March 2023
Click Here to watch the 3-minute video.