Ima-Abasi Okon: A Reader

Lydia Gifford (born 1979) lives and works in London. She received her MFA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2008 and has exhibited widely, staging solo shows including I Am Vertical at the Centre international d’art et du paysage, Île de Vassivière, France; Galería Alegría, Barcelona; Micky Schubert, Berlin; Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel; and David Roberts Art Foundation, London.

Anthea Hamilton (born 1978) is a London-based artist whose current practice comprises installation, sculpture and performance. Her work is always site-specific; a consideration of the location and the cultural and political environment, as well as her personal circumstances at the time, provide a framework for Hamilton’s research. Constituted from a combination of objects and images, found and made and rooted in a common experience of the world, the environments she produces are live and conversational. Hamilton’s work frequently considers the lineage of certain materials and images, tracing their changeable meanings in elaboration of alternative kinds of knowledge.

Taylor Le Melle is a writer. They especially gravitate towards stories that employ the trope of a dead or otherwise absent main character. They try to ingest rosemary early each morning, for clarity. Though they did not finish an architecture degree, their previous training in the discipline informs their current multi-disciplinary practice and belief that people should do and make things in whatever way feels pleasurable to them, regardless of how they professionally identify. Their recent work has included curating exhibitions, facilitating groups, building infrastructures, and producing audio tracks, diagrams and objects. Mostly they consider these latter three examples to be ‘draft objects’. Taylor Le Melle is co-editor of PSS, a publisher of printed material including most recently Orion J. Facey’s science fantasy novel The Virosexuals.

Fernando Domínguez Rubio (PhD Sociology, Cambridge University, 2008) is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (2020), an ethnography of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that explores the technologies, climatic infrastructures, and forms of care and labour required to prevent artworks from falling apart. He writes on how different forms of subjectivity and objectivity are produced, focusing, for example, on the relationship between enhancement technologies and political subjectivity or on the politics of design and urban infrastructures. He is also the co-editor of The Politics of Knowledge (2012).

Jody Simms was born and raised in Houston, Texas. Simms is a DJ, a radio host and a secondary school English teacher. She studied Africana Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City, where her final dissertation was in European Black Culture & Grime Music. It was at Barnard where she began her journey as a radio host. Her late-night radio show MADTINGSADTING ran on Barnard Radio in 2017–18 and hosted various guest artists. Having also learned to mix at PWRPLNT in Brooklyn, New York, in 2018 she went on two European tours with Junglepussy as the rapper’s concert DJ. In 2019, she began her PU$$YRAP radio show on London’s NTS Radio. The monthly show plays Hip Hop, Rap and Trap music exclusively by womxn rappers. Simms is also a scholar of Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, dedicated to analysing the trajectory and the cultural impact of these two women rappers.