Dr Alexandra Kokoli

Biography

I am an art historian, theorist, and educator of art practitioners, with an investment in art’s capacity for positive social change. My research into the aesthetics of feminist anti-nuclear activism at Greenham Common has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre and the Leverhulme Trust. In addition to the rich interface between art and activism, I am interested in art practices informed by and committed to feminism, as well as psychoanalytic approaches to visual and material culture. 

My publications include the edited collections Feminism Reframed, The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller, 1977-2007, (with Deborah Cherry), Art into Life: Essays on Tracey Emin, and the monograph The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice, where I explore aesthetic mobilisations of discomfort to feminist ends. I have published widely on artists including Quilla Constance, Susan Hiller, Catherine Hoffmann, and Monica Ross, and I am currently working on feminist approaches to heritage and commemoration through art practice. I sometimes curate and consult on curatorial projects involving artists whose practice I have researched, including crochet and textile artist Su Richardson. I am also research associate at the Centre for Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg, a transnational network of researchers foregrounding priorities and perspectives from the global south.

Teaching

I teach visual culture and contemporary art practices to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and supervise practice-led researchers. I currently teach on:

• BA Fine Art, Year 1, FNA1903: Art and Visual Culture
• BA Fine Art, Year 2, FNA2903: Research and Critical Analysis
• BA Fine Art, Year 3, FNA3630: Professional Practice & Curatorial Knowledge
• BA Fine Art, Year 3: dissertation supervision

Current PGR supervision:

• Kars Dodds, Dancing with Boobs: Investigating the Embodied Experience of AFAB Non-binary Dance Artists, MRes
• Anke Kempkes, Concrete Women: The Gender Paradox in Abstract Modernism, PhD by Public Works
• Qingyu Shen, Challenges and Reconstructions: Femininity in Contemporary Chinese Feminist Art from the 1990s to the Present, PhD

Completed PGR supervision: 

1. Dr. Bronwyn Platten, ‘Mouths and Meaning: A multi-sensory, creative and collaborative arts based exploration of food, eating and embodiment towards gaining greater understanding of the experience of eating disorders’, HaCIRIC, Department for the Built and Human Environment, University of Salford, 2012.

2. Dr. Paul Thompson, ‘An examination of the physical and temporal parameters of printmaking practice through the exploration and application of digital processes in making and cultural shifts in digital participation’, RGU, 2014.

3. Dr. Felicity Allen, ‘Creating the "dis-oeuvre": Interpreting feminist interventions as an expanded artistic practice in relation to art's institutions’, Middlesex University, 2016.

4. Dr. Caroline Gausden, ‘Feminist Manifestos and Socially Engaged Practice’, RGU, 2017.

5. Dr. Helen Bendon, ‘The artist as historyteller within museum and heritage sites’, Middlesex, 2018.

6. Dr. Kodwo Eshun, ‘The Philatelic Imagination of Pan-African Independence Under Platform Capitalism’, Middlesex, 2019.

7. Dr. Murray Anderson, ‘Queer Aesthetics of Empathy and Gothicness in Contemporary Sculpture’, Middlesex, 2020.

8. Dr. Paula Chambers, ‘Feral Objects and Acts of Domestic Piracy: Sculpture, Secular Magic and Strategies of Feminist Disruption’, Middlesex, 2020.

9. Dr. Sonya Dyer, ‘Towards Dark Fecundity - Reimagining Black futures through visual arts practice, science fiction and Greek mythology’, 2021.