Self-Fashioning in the Age of Social Media

With Edward Akintola Hubbard, Kyra Gaunt and Marijke De Roover

6 November 2021

Tickets

Panel discussion //

In virtual environments we pose, make selfies and carefully choose how to present ourselves. The rise of image-driven social media and dating platforms like Instagram, Tinder and Grindr has led to a culture of personalised visual aesthetics. Ordinary people worldwide have the chance to curate their own bodies, hair, fashion and locations for various uses – whether commercial or non-commercial. The self has become the main protagonist in a new industry of stories and galleries. How do these developments challenge our traditional ideas about what ‘art’ is? How are sex, sensuality and normativity expressed and contested on these platforms? What new genres and radical approaches to self-presentation are we witnessing? Are the stakes involved in personal visibility the same for everyone?

We talk about these issues with Edward Akintola Hubbard, Kyra Gaunt and Marijke De Roover. Edward Akintola Hubbard is assistant professor at the University of Utrecht, researching pop culture. Previously, he designed and taught courses at Harvard and New York universities on media and globalisation, avant-garde aesthetics, cinema, queer studies, urban arts and experimental etnography. Kyra Gaunt is an ‘ethnomusicologist’ and social media researcher working as an Assistant Professor at the University at Albany. She examines issues of gender and race in online platforms – from YouTube to Wikipedia. Marijke De Roover is an artists who makes ample use of the visual languages of social media. During the festival she is also presenting two performances (Live, Laugh, Limerence as part of the opening programme and The Eggcellent Adventures of Marijke De Roover / Part 1: A Womb of One’s Own on Saturday evening) and her work is part of the Modern Love exhibition at the IMPAKT Centre and the Centraal Museum.

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EDWARD AKINTOLA HUBBARD Marijke De Roover Kyra D Gaunt

EDWARD AKINTOLA HUBBARD

― Speaker

Edward Akintola Hubbard aka Akin is Assistant Professor of Arts and Society at Utrecht University and co-founder of Amsterdam-based art collective DARKMATTER. His interests are in cultural creolization, gothic and carnivalesque aesthetics, gender and sexuality, globalization, urbanism and popular culture, with a special focus on the African diaspora. His artistic practice is experimental ethnography, which is one of the courses he teaches at the university. IMPAKT has collaborated with Akin several times before: A, B and C (I will mention Rezaire and the panels you did in 2017)

Marijke De Roover

― Speaker

Marijke De Roover (Brussels, BE) is a part-time professional karaoke singer and meme connoisseur, yet currently known mostly for her queer/feminist performance work. She holds a Masters in Fine Arts from KASK School of Arts, Ghent (BE) where she was nominated for the Start Point Prize, Prague (CZ). In her artworks, she deals with questions regarding the nuclear family, feminism/motherhood, ethics of reproduction, and love, romance and compulsory heteronormativity under late capitalism. In 2020 she had her first institutional solo at Museum de Pont in Tilburg (NE). Her work has been shown at among others: Museum fur Neue Kunst, Freiburg (DE), David Roberts Art Foundation (Evening of Performance), London (UK), Garage Rotterdam (NL), Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (NL), Garage, Moscow (RU), BOZAR, Brussels (BE), ARCADE, London (UK), MABA, Nogent-sur-Marne (FR), Goethe Institute, Dusseldorf (DE), Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (DE).

Kyra D Gaunt

― Speaker

Digital ethnomusicologist Kyra Gaunt voices the unspoken through song, scholarship, and social media. Her prize-winning book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop and subsequent publications contributed to the emergence of hip-hop music studies, black girlhood studies, and hip-hop feminism. She is a Senior TED Fellow. Watch her in TED's "How the Jump Rope Got Its Rhythm" reaching over 7M+ views in over 28 languages and read her 2020 Editors' Pick of the Day article "The Magic of Black Girls Play" in the New York Times. Her next book is titled PLAYED: How Music Orchestrates Violence Against Black Girls on YouTube.

Archive

Festival 2021