Elizabeth Peebles

Biography

Elizabeth Peebles is Senior Lecturer on the Fine Art Programme at Chelsea and is currently a UAL Teaching Scholar. Research is published as Secondeditions, a collaborative partnership with artist Markus Eisenmann initiated in 2002.

Secondeditions is reflecting upon the relationship between art and the political from a premise of de-propriation, where the hierarchy of the original has been replaced by the equivalence of repetitions. The project explores the aporias of autonomous and institutional practice.

Recent work addresses legal and ethical realities and the economic, social and political conditions that sustain the rise of simulacra and the coinciding loss of the sensible, embodied referent. While this is no less likely than other forms of enquiry to mirror ideological assumptions, the perspectivist nature of truth is accepted and openly discussed calling on the abundance of intellectual possibilities – to think, and to think again.

The Secondeditions reference aligns with concepts such as ‘thought as power’ (Sturtevant), ‘thought-things’ (Hannah Arendt), the ‘ever-changing multiplicity’ (Sarat Maharaj), ‘focus upon the marginalized’ (Raymond Williams), and a ‘conjunctural analysis of the present’ (Stuart Hall).

The UAL Teaching Scholarship has supported the development of Street Corner Reading Rooms, a platform for students and alumni to convene invited speakers and participants and build a resource of live presentations, texts, bibliographies and associated publications. The motivation is to promote pluralist discourse, dialectics and intersectionality, togetherness and solidarity based on the acceptance of commonality and difference – ultimately to develop and support anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-prejudice paradigms.