Dr Isobel Harbison

Staff details

Dr Isobel Harbison

Position

Senior Lecturer (Critical Studies) in Art

Department

Art

Email

i.harbison (@gold.ac.uk)

Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups

Dr Isobel Harbison is an art historian, writer and cultural critic

Harbison teaches critical and creative approaches to histories of art. She writes for a range of academic and trade titles alongside teaching, including for The Baffler, Frieze, The London Review of Books and The White Review. In 2014, she was awarded a Fellowship in Arts Journalism by the Arts Foundation.

Harbison completed her PhD in 2015 at Goldsmiths where she was AHRC doctoral scholar. Her first monograph, Performing Image (MIT Press, 2019), addressed art's role in an age of technology capitalism and social media. She often gives talks in museums, universities and other institutions, and sometimes programmes events and screenings.

She is completing her second book, which explores the life and legacy of a female sign designer in Las Vegas in the 1950s (MUP, forthcoming). It was shortlisted for a Hay Festival Writers Award (2024). She was a 2024 writer-in-residence at Writing Downtown. She is a 2024 Eccles Fellow at the British Library and a 2024-5 Eadington Fellow at UNLV.

Academic qualifications

  • PhD (Art Theory), Goldsmiths, University of London 2015
  • MFA (Curating), Goldsmiths, University of London 2008
  • BA (History of Art and Architecture), Trinity College, Dublin 2004

Teaching and supervision

I teach critical studies and creative writing to students on the BA Fine Art Extension programme, and I supervise PhD students in a range of areas including histories of modern and contemporary art; histories of performance and moving image; complex located histories of art; post-colonial and anti-racist histories of art; art and creative writing.

Research interests

Harbison has been publishing art criticism since 2004, writing about a range of artists working in new media, performance and moving image. She is interested in researching located art histories, feminist art histories, and alternative histories of the Spectacle.

Performing Image, Harbison’s first monograph, was published by the MIT Press in 2019. It considers what agency art might have in relation to social media, as identity performance and DIY video-making accelerates under technology capitalism. The book reflects on how artists have long combined performance and moving image to challenge viewers with analyses of works by Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Lorraine O’Grady, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Leslie Thornton, Ericka Beckman, Shu Lea Cheang, Frances Stark, Mark Leckey, Cécile B Evans, Ligia Lewis, Wu Tsang, Every Ocean Hughes and Martine Syms.

In 2020, she was awarded a research fellowship by the Paul Mellon Centre to research independent and artists’ film made in Northern Ireland from 1968 to the post-Brexit present. The ongoing research examines successive waves filmmakers active over the past fifty years in relation to key political events and media histories, patterns of distribution within international contexts, and policies and instances of state censorship. Interviews with artists aim to track work filmed by and among communities during turbulent years. Parts of the research have been published in articles and book chapters, with other elements informing public talks, conference papers and museum events and screenings.

She is currently completing the manuscript of her second book, a study of a female sign designer in Las Vegas who was active from the 1950s and the women, entertainers, organisers and artists who came to work beneath them. It is a true story of night, light, women and power. Recent non-fiction writing has been shortlisted for the Hay Festival and Eccles Centre Writer's Award, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize (both 2024).

Grants and awards

2020: Research Fellow
Paul Mellon Centre

2024: Eadington Fellow
Centre of Gaming Research, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

2019: Research Resident
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

2014: Fellow
Arts Foundation, Fellowship in Arts Journalism

2010: Doctoral Scholar
Arts and Humanities Research Council

2024: Writer resident
WRITERS DOWNTOWN, supported by PLYMPTON literary studio

2024: Fellow
Eccles Fellow at the British Museum

Publications and research outputs

Book

Harbison, Isobel. 2019. Performing Image. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 9780262039215

Book Section

Harbison, Isobel. 2022. Whose time is it anyway? In: Christina Kennedy, ed. The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now - IMMA: 30 Years of the Global Contemporary. Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, pp. 22-30. ISBN 9781909792272

Harbison, Isobel. 2022. NOT/ MY/ SCENE. In: Charles Asprey, ed. A.B. Real Life. London: Charles Asprey, pp. 34-39. ISBN 9781399924894

Harbison, Isobel. 2019. Of saving, of hoarding, of keeping to hand. In: Niamh O'Malley, ed. handle. Dublin: Royal Hibernian Academy, pp. 63-69. ISBN 1903875935

Article

Harbison, Isobel. 2022. Try Lizzie Borden: Derry Film and Video Workshop & distribution beyond the Broadcast Ban. Try Lizzie Borden,

Harbison, Isobel. 2021. Here to Stay: On the history of Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery. Frieze Masters(9), pp. 24-29.

Harbison, Isobel. 2021. Or Other, Or Both. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 51, pp. 144-155. ISSN 1465-4253

Conference or Workshop Item

Harbison, Isobel. 2022. 'An Inventory of Traces: Rethinking public archives and collections beyond the nation/state'. In: Association for Art History’s 48th Annual Conference. Goldsmiths, University of London/ online, United Kingdom 6 - 8 April 2022.

Harbison, Isobel. 2022. 'The Derry Film and Video Workshop & distribution beyond the Broadcast Ban'. In: Northern Ireland’s Feminist and Queer Art Histories. The Courtauld Institute of Art, United Kingdom 21 January 2022.

Harbison, Isobel. 2021. 'Art Criticism and the Pandemic II - Safer Spaces'. In: Safer Spaces. London, United Kingdom May 2021.

Show/Exhibition

Harbison, Isobel. 2022. Tapes Under the Bed. In: "Tapes Under the Bed", Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland, 26 November 2022.

Harbison, Isobel. 2014. Pre-Pop to Post-human: Collage in the digital age. In: "Pre-pop to Post-human: Collage In The Digital Age", Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, United Kingdom, 25 January 2014 - 21 June 2015.

Harbison, Isobel. 2013. Image Games: Ericka Beckman. In: "Image Games: Ericka Beckman", Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, 28–29 September 2013.

Professional projects

In 2020, Harbison launched, ‘Northern Ireland: Art, Media and Politics’ in association with the Research Programme’s MARS. Further research is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre (2020). Associated research on art and media was undertaken as Research Resident at the Rauschenberg Foundation, New York (2019) and as Eadington Fellow (2020) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Harbison has worked as a curator with Hayward Gallery Touring, Tate Modern, Auto Italia, Chelsea Space, TBGS Dublin and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. She has spoken and chaired discussions at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, the National Gallery, the Contemporary Art Society, Hayward Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Swiss Institute, New York.

She has taught and lectured at the Royal Academy School, Royal College of Art, Slade School of Fine Art, Central St Martins, Arts University Bournemouth, in Ireland at NCAD and IADT, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Research projects

2022-2022: Tapes Under The Bed
A one-day international seminar comprising of talks, screenings and panel discussions exploring how to best preserve endangered film and video archives from the 1980s onwards.

Media engagements

2020: Talk Show, Resonance FM
Regular contributor to Art Monthly’s monthly live talk show on Resonance FM

Conferences and talks

2020: National Gallery London
In-conversation with Artist-in-Residence Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer

2019: Trinity College Dublin
No Longer Peripheral: Moving Image Culture (AEMI conference)

2019: School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Blue-Skying: Social Media and the Arts (conference)

2019: Block Universe, Festival of Performance
Performing the Digital Self (conference panel)

2018: Tate Modern
Performance in Contemporary Art (panel)

2024: Her Midnight Signs: on the light, life and legacy of Ms Betty Willis
Plugged In: Art and Electric Light, symposium at the California Institute of Technology and Norton Simon Museum, LA

2024: ARE YOU BEING OBSERVED?
Strip Searching: Security of Subjugation, paper at IMMA

2024: Derry Film and Video Collective, PANEL
Radical Filmmakers Network, CONFERENCE

Media contributions

Commentary and quotes for a range of news outlets including the Guardian, Sky News and London's Metro newspaper.