Dr Sabrina Chou

Biography

I am an artist, researcher, and writer. My practice is inflected with an interest in the circulations, migrations, and transmissions of social bodies and their potential collectivity. My work manifests in sculptures, broadcasts, textile constructions, video-objects, and writing. Sculptures I make inhabit or borrow from existing forms such as equipment, screens, clothing, and architectures. I use aesthetics of functionality to address a bodily dimension and to provide material entry points where epistemological and ontological categories misalign or collide. Such gaps or frictions produce modes through which viewers may question existing spatial conditions or social practices. In published texts, as sculptural elements, or presented on digital screens, I use language to reflect on the uneasy condition of a provisional social body—historically constituted, externally regulated, and immediately corporeal.

Through my research I reflect on the role of technological apparatuses in shaping the social as well as on the potential of artworks themselves to perform as discursive objects. My work considers a long view of technology and its characterization within a social body—both in terms of apparatuses of the body as well as in terms of the role of technologies in a/effecting collective socialities. I develop sculptural works that address the inoperative as a mode for suspending objects from a sphere of value (use, exchange, or symbolic) in order to unfix form and render its reading an unfolding process. Through proposals of bodies as incomplete, changing, and necessarily fragmented, I seek to counter dominant modern narratives of the formation of social knowledges and practices (e.g., the technological) in which an organism—whether a single body or a community—is a unitary system. Instead, I think through processes such as digestion and dismemberment as alternate theories of social de/re/formation. Just as another technology—and history—is possible, another body is possible.

I am currently Lecturer in Critical Studies BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. I have worked as a guest lecturer on fine art and design courses in the UK, Netherlands, and US, including UCL Bartlett, Willem de Kooning Academy, Piet Zwart Institute, and Harvard University. I have been an artist in residence at the Centre International d’art et du paysage Île de Vassiviere, Kunsthuis Syb, and Stiftung Sitterwerk. I was the creator and co-host of Work Better, a talk show on KCHUNG Radio in Los Angeles, which brought together art, current events, and social interactions.

My work has been included in exhibitions, performances, screenings, and radio broadcasts at Het Nieuwe Institute, NL; W139, NL; the Museum of Contemporary Art, US; the Armand Hammer Museum, US; TENT, NL; Magasin, FR; r22 Tout-Monde, FR; Human Resources in Los Angeles, US; and the Jakobstads Museum, FI, amongst others. My writing has been published in, for example, Thresholds (2020), Ringgummimatte (Spector Press, 2020), and Datapolis (nai010 publishers, 2023).

I completed my doctoral dissertation, titled Constitutions in 2022 at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. My doctoral research was fully funded by the Clarendon Fund and St Johns College Ioan and Rosemary James Scholarship. I received my Master of Fine Art from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, NL and my Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Environmental Studies/Studio Art from Harvard University in Cambridge, US.