I am an experienced Lecturer in Fine Art and my research is interdisciplinary and rigorously interrogates the challenges we face in our changing world. Employing intersectional feminism, critical theory, Black critique, and environmental humanities I examine art and culture to create new connections in writing, exhibitions and practice. I have a multifaceted artistic practice that employs three-dimensionality in installation, film and performance, studying at the Royal Academy Schools. My practice-based PhD Global Extraction and Cultural Production (2015) defines ‘the extractive impulse,’ as central to the economy and encroachingly central to culture, extraction in its multiple forms continues to be at the heart of contemporary environmental crises, and I outline the global historical forms of ‘primitive accumulation’ that encroach on indigenous populations in my thesis and the chapter ‘Feeding Like a Parasite’ (2018). I further develop the concept of the extractive impulse in the article ‘The Extractive Unconscious in Science Fiction: A Saga of Concrete and Gas’ (2022) that develops a theory of petro-totality within speculative and Science Fiction. In ‘A Materialist Reading of Abject Art: Performance, Social Reproduction and Capitalism’ (2021) I approach the theory of abjection from a social reproduction perspective, asserting that abjection in art corresponds with economic recessions. The paper focuses on the Japanese performance group Hi Red Centre and performances by women and ‘crip’ artists that mine the abject to illuminate structures of inequality and stigma. Recently I co-ordinated the symposium and co-curated the exhibition Petrologic/Machine Intimacy at De Montfort University in 2023, that draws on my research into petrocultures, and I am currently developing this research into another exhibition and a wider trans-disciplinary research network that looks at art and ecologies in the East Midlands.
Brand, C. (2018) ‘Feeding Like a Parasite’: Extraction and Science Fiction in Capitalist Dystopia’ in Davies, W. (ed.) Economic Science Fictions, London: Goldsmiths Press.
Brand, C., (2021) ‘A Materialist Reading of Abject Art: Performance, Social Reproduction and Capitalism’, Open Library of Humanities 7(1), p.3. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.396
Brand, C. (2022) 'The Necropolitics of Reproduction: Black Feminism, Mothers and the Death Drive,' in Carson, R. Halligan, B. et al (ed.) Politics of the Many: Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency, London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 153-170.
Brand, C. (2022) ‘The Extractive Unconscious in Science Fiction: A Saga of Concrete and Gas’ In Strange Horizons, Special Issue: Science Fiction and Extractivism. Accessed here http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/the-extractive-unconscious-in-science-fiction-a-saga-of-concrete-and-gas/
I am accepting proposal for PhD's in the following areas:
Art and the environment, ecology, and petrocultures
Art and Feminism
Art and politics and Marxism
Necropolitics and Art
Art and science fiction