Dr Marina Vishmidt
Staff details
I joined the Centre for Culture Studies in 2016 and the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies in 2017, having taught primarily in European art academy contexts till then. My research is mainly concerned with the nexus between art, value and labour, with an emphasis on the speculative relations that link processes of financialisation and subjectivation. My work overall draws on disciplines including continental philosophy, aesthetics, political economy, feminist theory and black studies.
I have developed a distinctive profile within and between the spheres of the academy, artistic spaces and activism, where I practice as a writer, editor and organiser. I also have a specialism in artists moving image from a critical and curatorial perspective, and worked for many years in a voluntary capacity with the Cinenova Working Group.
Academic qualifications
- PhD Critical Management and Political Economy, Queen Mary, University of London. Supervised by Prof Peter Fleming. 2013
- MA Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London. Supervised by Prof Ray Brassier. 2004
- BA Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, New York. 1998
Teaching and Supervision
Research interests
My work involves considering questions around the conditions of production, whether that is to do with the production of art, of (political) subjectivity, of concepts and of infrastructures. It is thus informed by a materialist displacement of the problem of the 'transcendental' as a condition for anything to be realised - such as art or culture -and requires attending to the within and against of conditions of agency or performance that both perpetuate and can take us beyond the current world. This is the arena I have been exploring as the common space between artistic practices and financial products as 'speculation'
In my published essays, I have developed influential concepts such as 'infrastructural critique' and 'reproductive realism', the elaboration of which my next monograph will be dedicated to.
My last monograph, published with Brill in 2018 and with Haymarket in late 2019, deals with the 'speculative' as a mode of production, departing from the critique of political economy and critical aesthetics to craft an innovative hypothesis about the relationship between the devaluation of labour and the imperative to (self-) valorise. As well as the ideological magnetism of finance, this pressure finds a genealogy in the division of labour between creation and maintenance, exchange and use: a conflictual division that marks the proximity of extraction and valorisation in the aesthetic subject. I also have a long-term interest in negation, abstraction and ambivalence as epistemological, ontological and political currents in art and in social movements, particularly in histories of feminism/s.
Publications and research outputs
Book Section
Vishmidt, Marina and Sutherland, Zoe. 2022. (Un)making Value: Reading Social Reproduction through the Question of Totality. In: Kevin Floyd; Jen Hedler Phillis and Sarika Chandra, eds. Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capita. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 67-90. ISBN 9780823298198
Vishmidt, Marina; Cuomo, Raphaël; Iorio, Maria and van Oldenborgh, Wendelien. 2021. Documentary – Disjunction: A Conversation Between Raphaël Cuomo, Maria Iorio, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Marina Vishmidt about the Films The Interpreter and No False Echoes. In: Mira Fliescher; Fabian Goppelsröder and Dieter Mersch, eds. Sichtbarkeiten 4: Praktiken visuellen Denkens. Zürich: diaphanes, pp. 365-388. ISBN 9783037347447
Vishmidt, Marina. 2021. Glossary of Key Terms: Money. In: Mark Stevens, ed. Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 204-207. ISBN 9781501351112
Vishmidt, Marina. 2020. Die Möglichkeit einer spekulativen Produktionsweise. In: Kathrin Busch; Georg Dickmann; Maja Figge and Felix Laubscher, eds. Das Ästhetisch-Spekulative. Paderborn/Leiden: Wilhelm Fink/Brill, pp. 258-277. ISBN 9783770564385
Vishmidt, Marina and Sutherland, Zoe. 2020. Social Reproduction: New Questions for the Gender, Affect, and Substance of Value. In: Jennifer Cooke, ed. The New Feminist Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 143-154. ISBN 9781108599504
Gilligan, Melanie and Vishmidt, Marina. 2020. A Conversation: Melanie Gilligan and Marina Vishmidt. In: Maurin Dietrich and Gloria Hasnay, eds. Not Working - Reader. Munich/Berlin: Kunstverein München e.V./Archive Books, pp. 18-39. ISBN 9783948212377
Vishmidt, Marina and Ah, Ernest. 2020. New Ruins. In: Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Ernest Ah, eds. beyond repair. Berlin: Archive Books. ISBN 9783948212421
Article
Vishmidt, Marina. 2022. Review of Sophie Cras, The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s. caa.reviews, ISSN 1543-950X
Vishmidt, Marina. 2021. ”Only as Self-Relating Negativity”: Infrastructure and Critique. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 13(3), pp. 13-24. ISSN 1646-9798
Vishmidt, Marina. 2021. Post-Reality Markets and Structured Financial Time Products. Making & Breaking(2),
Vishmidt, Marina. 2021. Cuerpos en el espacio: En los extremos de la vulnerabilidad. Concreta: Sobre creaciόn y teoria de la imagen(17),
Vishmidt, Marina and Kastner, Jens. 2021. Finanzielle Unabhängigkeit: Der Wert und die verrohten Subjekte der Kulturindustrien. Bildpunkt: Zieitschrift der IG Bildende Kunst(59), pp. 26-27.
Vishmidt, Marina and Petrossiants, Andreas. 2020. Spaces of Speculation: Movement Politics in the Infrastructure - An Interview with Marina Vishmidt. Historical Materialism Blog,
Vishmidt, Marina. 2020. Response, Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism. nonsite(32), ISSN 2164-1668
Vishmidt, Marina. 2020. On Cameron Rowland. Artforum, 58(8), pp. 164-165. ISSN 0004-3532
Vishmidt, Marina. 2020. Preview: Cameron Rowland at the ICA. Artforum, 58(5), p. 85. ISSN 0004-3532
Vishmidt, Marina. 2019. Books: Best of 2019 – Anne Boyer, The Undying. Artforum, 58(4), pp. 70-73. ISSN 0004-3532
Conference or Workshop Item
Moreno, Louis and Vishmidt, Marina. 2019. 'End-of-the-World Trade: On the Speculative Economies of Art and Extraction'. In: End-of-the-World Trade: On the Speculative Economies of Art and Extraction. Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom 21 - 22 June 2019.
Further profile content
Featured publications
Professional projects
Alongside my research and teaching work, I have been involved as an editor on a number of publications, including Look at Hazards Look at Losses, co-edited with KUDA and Anthony Iles (Berlin: Mute Publishing, 2017), Anguish Language, co-edited with John Cunningham, Anthony Iles and Mira Mattar (Berlin and Milan: Archive Books, 2015), WINTER: Poetics and Politics, (Milan and Oslo: Oslo Academy of Art and Mousse Publishing, 2013) and Uncorporate Identity, co-edited with Metahaven (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2010). I have contributed to textbooks such as the Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (SAGE, 2018) and the Handbook of Marxism (SAGE, 2021). I am on the editorial board of the book series New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society (Bloomsbury Academic) and South as a State of Mind journal.
Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups
Conferences and talks
2020:
‘Producing the Vulnerable Body in a Biopolitical Crisis’, Art Criticism and the Pandemic series
organised by Art Monthly and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
2019:
‘Speculation as a Mode of Production: Of Art, of Value, of Subjects and of Reasons’
Kunsthistorisches Seminar, Kunstmuseum Basel
2018:
‘Reproductive Realism: Around a Critical Aesthetics of Gendered Labour'
’, Histórias Feministas seminar, Museu de Arte São Paulo
Grants and awards
2021:
Research Fellow with the ‘Social Reproduction: Looking for Jeanne’ (2019 – 2022) project
Funded by the Swedish Research Council
2019:
MeCCSA Climate Change Network Grant
for 'End of the World Trade: On the Speculative Economies of Art and Extraction' symposium
2019:
Digital Worldmaking Fund, Goldsmiths
for 'End of the World Trade: On the Speculative Economies of Art and Extraction' symposium
2008:
• ESRC doctoral studentship in Critical Management and Political Economy, Queen Mary, University of London
for my PhD project
