In this reading list artist Soojin Chang shares some of the texts that have informed their moving-image work BXBY, commissioned for the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022.
BXBY is a semi-fictional work that reflects upon and interrogates the category of species. Part documentary and part performance, this contemporary creation story follows the artist as a hybrid being who is trying to learn to reproduce.
Reading list:
Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, Joshua Bennett, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Mel Chen, Duke University Press, 2012.
Making Kin Not Population, Adele Clark and Donna Haraway (editors), Amsterdam University Press, 2018
“The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.”, Saidiya Hartman in Souls, vol. 18, no. 1, 2016, pp. 166–73. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1162596
“Food.” Lindsay Kelley in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach, Ron Broglio. Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. 232 – 246
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, NYU Press, 2020
“Using Surrogate Species and Groups for Conservation Planning and Management.”, John A. Wiens, Gregory D. Hayward, Richard S. Holthausen, Michael J. Wisdom in BioScience, Volume 58, Issue 3, March 2008, Pages 241–252, https://doi.org/10.1641/B580310
Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans, Eben Kirksey, Bristol University Press, 2021
“Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene.”, Eben Kirksey in Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 36, no. 6, Nov. 2019, pp. 197–219, doi:10.1177/0263276418769995
Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis, Verso Books, 2021
Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, Keguro Macharia, NYU Press, 2019
“Step-by-step guide to carrying out IVF on cows.”, Michael Priestly in Farmers Weekly, 2016. https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/livestock-breeding/step-step-guide-carrying-ivf-cows
Select Committee on Science and Technology Fifth Report: Human-animal chimera or hybrid embryos and research. UK Parliament, April 2007
“Identity is a Poor Substitute for Relating: Genetic Ancestry, Critical Polyamory, Property, and Relations.”, Kim Tallbear in Critical Indigenous Studies Handbook, Routledge, 2021: 267-478
Gut Feminism, Elizabeth Wilson, Duke University Press, 2015.
“Disappearing Bitches: Canine Affect and Postcolonial Bioethics.”, Hyaesin Yoon in Configurations, vol. 24, no. 3, 2016, pp. 351–74. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2016.0022
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Kathryn Yusoff, The University of Minnesota Press, 2019
