Artist Candice Lin discusses her exhibition, Pigs and Poison at Spike Island and her broader practice with scholar Neel Ahuja. Their conversation will focus on disease ecology and the affects and materiality of contagion and control during and after the colonial period.

It is hosted and co-organised with Sophie Guo and Andrew Cummings from The Courtauld Research Forum and is followed by a Q&A with the online audience.

CANDICE LIN

Candice Lin (b. 1979, Concord, Massachusetts) works in Los Angeles, California. She received her BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics from Brown University, in 2001, and MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, in 2004. Her practice utilises installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mould, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She addresses themes of race, gender, and sexuality in relationship to material histories of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora. Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Germany; Louisiana State University Museum of Art, New Orleans (all 2021); Pitzer Galleries, Claremont, CA; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Art Center, Canada; Ludlow 38, New York; Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles, (all 2019) as well as the exhibition cycle A Hard White Body at Bétonsalon, Paris (2017); Portikus, Frankfurt; and the Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (both 2018). Lin has been included in recent group exhibitions and biennials at the ICA, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; Beirut Art Center (all 2019); the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (both 2018); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017); the New Museum, New York, and SculptureCenter New York (all 2017). She is the recipient of several residencies, grants and fellowships, including the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), The Artists Project Award (2018), Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), the Davidoff Art Residency (2018) and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She is Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA.

NEEL AHUJA

Neel Ahuja is Visiting Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ahuja is the author of two books, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016) and Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (2021). He has written a variety of essays on the connections of race and colonialism to the fields of disability studies and animal studies. He is currently working on two research areas, one exploring the race and species politics of COVID-19 and another analysing United States counterterrorism incarceration, rendition, and interrogation practices.