Alexa Wright

Translating Vitalities is a shifting and changing international collective of artists, anthropologists, medical and healing practitioners, historians, and other humanists and non-humanists who regularly come together in the service of making collaborative work to understand lifeworlds and their translations and transformations. We have been meeting more or less annually since 2014. This year we were due to meet at the Max Plank Institute in Berlin. Due to Covid19 the in-person meeting was cancelled, but several of us met on Zoom instead to share ideas, and participate in smaller group workshops and experiments on the subject of breathing and the breath. 

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Click here to view group experiment 

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translatingvitalities.com 

In June my article 'Some Reflections off the Practice of Research' was published in the online Journal, Creative Media Research.

This book is comprised of academic essays, personal reflections, and creative writing from researchers and artists involved in an ongoing collaborative art-science project about the experience and culture of heart transplantation. The writings and reflections included discuss embodiment, what it means to inhabit a body and define oneself in relation to it, including struggles with identity formation; set in both clinical and private spaces. 

The uniqueness of this volume consists in the authors’ aim of connecting the specific experience of heart transplantation to the more widely shared experience of relating to the world and one another through the body’s physical, perceived, and imagined boundaries. Such boundaries and the commonly held beliefs in personal autonomy that are associated with them are a subject of ongoing philosophical and scientific debate. What’s more, the resources of art and culture, including popular culture, literature, historical and contemporary art, are extremely useful in revising our views of what it means for the body’s boundaries to be philosophically ‘leaky.’

My contribution is a photo-text work that creatively explores the experiences of a donor family and a recipient and family. 

"As long as there have been monsters, there have been attempts to make sense of them, to explain where they come from and what they mean. This book collects the best of what contemporary scholars have to say on the subject, in the process creating a map of the monstrous across the vast and complex terrain of the human psyche.

Including the most interesting and important proponents of monster theory and its progenitors, from Sigmund Freud to Julia Kristeva to J. Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Barbara Creed, and Stephen T. Asma—as well as harder-to-find contributions such as Robin Wood’s and Masahiro Mori’s—this is the most extensive and comprehensive collection of scholarship on monsters and monstrosity across disciplines and methods ever to be assembled and will serve as an invaluable resource for students of the uncanny in all its guises."

​

From August 5 to 9, 2019 scholars, researchers, artists and students from the domains of Arts, Ethics, Medicine, and Social Sciences met  to discuss topics including: bodily boundaries, anonymity in organ donation, the popular imaginary in organ transplantation, and cross-cultural aspects of organ donation. The meeting was accompanied by a new exhibition of works by: Alexa Wright, Andrew Carnie, Emily Jan, Dana Dal Bo and Ingrid Bachmann.

​

Cracking the Established Order (CtEO) was a two day interdisciplinary conference where researchers and artists explored the ongoing accelerating influence of practice-based research, as it continues to shape new ways of thinking about research and creative methodologies. 

​

I presented the Hybrid Bodies Heart Project at the Royal Anthropological Society Art Materiality and Representation Conference at the British Museum on 3rd June, 2018

The next stage of our work in progress for the Hybrid Bodies Project, and a two-day workshop bringing together people from a broad range of disciplines to further explore the theme of organ donation. 

​

​

​

The first showing of works made for Part 2 of an international, interdisciplinary project looking at heart transplantation, this time focusing on the experience of donor families. 

​

October 20-November 16, 2017

Preview 6-8pm, Thursday 19th October

All welcome.

2nd edition

Opening: Thu 15 June, 6 – 9pm - all welcome

SPACE Mare Street

​

​I am showing a work in progress in this second edition of the London Creative Network (LCN) Showcase, which illustrates how artists are continuously exploring new technologies and ideas to push contemporary art practice as a dynamic and engaged contribution to wider culture.

I am in Toronto for our annual team meeting until 4th March. Exciting plans for future events (watch this space) later this year in London, plus viewing research material and meeting with scientists. 

Piecing it Together collages are on show at The Tavistock Centre, 120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA.

I have a place on the London Creative Network Programme to support me to make a third video in the 'Fragility of Everyday Life' series 

'There's So Much More I Want To Tell You' was shown at Visions in the Nunnery, 2016, Bow Arts, London

I am an invited speaker at:

Faculty of Rehabilitation & Social Psychiatry Annual Conference, Cardiff, CF10 2FL 

I am an invited keynote speaker at the Disability Arts And Health Conference, University of Bergen

http://www.uib.no/en/rg/genbod/96803/disability-arts-and-health-conference

The Hybrid Bodies exhibition opened at KKW in Leipzig, Germany. The opening was preceded by talks by the artists: Ingrid Bachmann, Alexa Wright, Andrew Carnie and Philosopher, Margrit Shildrick. 

Athens Photo Festival 2016: Photobook Show

Scan Photobooks, Tarragona, Spain

A selection of the photos from A View From Inside is showing in 'Phantom Limb', Victoria Museum and Gallery, Liverpool: This is a Liverpool Biennale Fringe exhibition. 

The Conference Centre, St Pancras Hospital,

4 St Pancras Way, London NW1 0PE

Bus: 46, 214 / Tube: Mornington Crescent or Kings Cross/St Pancras

Speakers:

Helen Killaspy – Professor of Psychiatry, UCL

Alexa Wright – Artist

Chris Bird (and others) Service Users

Jill Bryan – Portugal Prints 

Followed by drinks and conversation 

An exhibition of works made during the participatory project, Piecing it Together is at: 

The Conference Centre, St Pancras Hospital,

4 St Pancras Way, London NW1 0PE

Bus: 46, 214 / Tube: Mornington Crescent or Kings Cross/St Pancras

I participated in a conference and workshops associated with 9 Evenings Revisited at KKW, Leipzig, Germany:

I presented the Hybrid Bodies project at Silent Signal symposium in Derby

Translating Vitalities is a shifting and changing international collective of artists, anthropologists, medical and healing practitioners, historians, and other humanists and non-humanists who regularly come together in the service of making collaborative work to understand lifeworlds and their translations and transformations. We have been meeting more or less annually since 2014. This year we were due to meet at the Max Plank Institute in Berlin. Due to Covid19 the in-person meeting was cancelled, but several of us met on Zoom instead to share ideas, and participate in smaller group workshops and experiments on the subject of breathing and the breath. 

​

Click here to view group experiment 

​

translatingvitalities.com 

In June my article 'Some Reflections off the Practice of Research' was published in the online Journal, Creative Media Research.

This book is comprised of academic essays, personal reflections, and creative writing from researchers and artists involved in an ongoing collaborative art-science project about the experience and culture of heart transplantation. The writings and reflections included discuss embodiment, what it means to inhabit a body and define oneself in relation to it, including struggles with identity formation; set in both clinical and private spaces. 

The uniqueness of this volume consists in the authors’ aim of connecting the specific experience of heart transplantation to the more widely shared experience of relating to the world and one another through the body’s physical, perceived, and imagined boundaries. Such boundaries and the commonly held beliefs in personal autonomy that are associated with them are a subject of ongoing philosophical and scientific debate. What’s more, the resources of art and culture, including popular culture, literature, historical and contemporary art, are extremely useful in revising our views of what it means for the body’s boundaries to be philosophically ‘leaky.’

My contribution is a photo-text work that creatively explores the experiences of a donor family and a recipient and family. 

"As long as there have been monsters, there have been attempts to make sense of them, to explain where they come from and what they mean. This book collects the best of what contemporary scholars have to say on the subject, in the process creating a map of the monstrous across the vast and complex terrain of the human psyche.

Including the most interesting and important proponents of monster theory and its progenitors, from Sigmund Freud to Julia Kristeva to J. Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Barbara Creed, and Stephen T. Asma—as well as harder-to-find contributions such as Robin Wood’s and Masahiro Mori’s—this is the most extensive and comprehensive collection of scholarship on monsters and monstrosity across disciplines and methods ever to be assembled and will serve as an invaluable resource for students of the uncanny in all its guises."

​

From August 5 to 9, 2019 scholars, researchers, artists and students from the domains of Arts, Ethics, Medicine, and Social Sciences met  to discuss topics including: bodily boundaries, anonymity in organ donation, the popular imaginary in organ transplantation, and cross-cultural aspects of organ donation. The meeting was accompanied by a new exhibition of works by: Alexa Wright, Andrew Carnie, Emily Jan, Dana Dal Bo and Ingrid Bachmann.

​

Cracking the Established Order (CtEO) was a two day interdisciplinary conference where researchers and artists explored the ongoing accelerating influence of practice-based research, as it continues to shape new ways of thinking about research and creative methodologies. 

​

I presented the Hybrid Bodies Heart Project at the Royal Anthropological Society Art Materiality and Representation Conference at the British Museum on 3rd June, 2018

The next stage of our work in progress for the Hybrid Bodies Project, and a two-day workshop bringing together people from a broad range of disciplines to further explore the theme of organ donation. 

​

​

​

The first showing of works made for Part 2 of an international, interdisciplinary project looking at heart transplantation, this time focusing on the experience of donor families. 

​

October 20-November 16, 2017

Preview 6-8pm, Thursday 19th October

All welcome.

2nd edition

Opening: Thu 15 June, 6 – 9pm - all welcome

SPACE Mare Street

​

​I am showing a work in progress in this second edition of the London Creative Network (LCN) Showcase, which illustrates how artists are continuously exploring new technologies and ideas to push contemporary art practice as a dynamic and engaged contribution to wider culture.

I am in Toronto for our annual team meeting until 4th March. Exciting plans for future events (watch this space) later this year in London, plus viewing research material and meeting with scientists. 

Piecing it Together collages are on show at The Tavistock Centre, 120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA.

I have a place on the London Creative Network Programme to support me to make a third video in the 'Fragility of Everyday Life' series 

'There's So Much More I Want To Tell You' was shown at Visions in the Nunnery, 2016, Bow Arts, London

I am an invited speaker at:

Faculty of Rehabilitation & Social Psychiatry Annual Conference, Cardiff, CF10 2FL 

I am an invited keynote speaker at the Disability Arts And Health Conference, University of Bergen

http://www.uib.no/en/rg/genbod/96803/disability-arts-and-health-conference

The Hybrid Bodies exhibition opened at KKW in Leipzig, Germany. The opening was preceded by talks by the artists: Ingrid Bachmann, Alexa Wright, Andrew Carnie and Philosopher, Margrit Shildrick. 

Athens Photo Festival 2016: Photobook Show

Scan Photobooks, Tarragona, Spain

A selection of the photos from A View From Inside is showing in 'Phantom Limb', Victoria Museum and Gallery, Liverpool: This is a Liverpool Biennale Fringe exhibition. 

The Conference Centre, St Pancras Hospital,

4 St Pancras Way, London NW1 0PE

Bus: 46, 214 / Tube: Mornington Crescent or Kings Cross/St Pancras

Speakers:

Helen Killaspy – Professor of Psychiatry, UCL

Alexa Wright – Artist

Chris Bird (and others) Service Users

Jill Bryan – Portugal Prints 

Followed by drinks and conversation 

An exhibition of works made during the participatory project, Piecing it Together is at: 

The Conference Centre, St Pancras Hospital,

4 St Pancras Way, London NW1 0PE

Bus: 46, 214 / Tube: Mornington Crescent or Kings Cross/St Pancras

I participated in a conference and workshops associated with 9 Evenings Revisited at KKW, Leipzig, Germany:

I presented the Hybrid Bodies project at Silent Signal symposium in Derby