Gil Mualem-Doron (*1970, Israel) is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and curator who lives and works in Brighton, UK. His work investigates issues such as identity and place, histories of displacement, embodied experiences of migration, the legacies of colonialism, social practices, and transcultural aesthetics. His PhD thesis „The Dead Zone & The Architecture of Transgression“ incorporates these issues as well as investigates historical and contemporary urban planning concepts from postcolonial perspectives.

„What is sovereign in fact is to enjoy the present time without having anything else in view but this present time.“ (Georges Bataille, “The Accursed Share”, vol2 1993 :199)

It is impossible to summarise the work I have been doing at the residency because of the fragmented, multilayered and prolific nature of it. The meandering around Schöppingen led to photographic documentation of the hunting booths [Hochsitz] dotted around the fields and surrounding forest. This photography series was influenced, at the same time, by a critique of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work. It includes another series of socially engaged photography works with Yanick, a gay refugee from Cameroon, a journey to Berlin for his first ever Pride and a series of conversations with him on how the colonial past is affecting his present. These two separate photography series are united by their production during the residency but also by the necropolitics* that are affecting the subjects of both series of works and that have affected my and my family’s history of displacement.

*see: Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, 2019 and Eds Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco, “Queer Necropolitics”, 2015