Neo Musangi
Neo Sinoxolo Musangi is a queer feminist living in Olkejuado, Kenya. They work in art and academia; is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Art, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR); is a founding member of the Black Planetary Futures Collective, and teaches Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Lawrence and American University.
Overarching praxis statement:
Neo is particularly interested in exploring the possibilities— and querying the limitations—of disciplinary formation as often prescribed by “tradition” within both the academy and the art marketplace, as well as the audiences that these practice-knowledges convene. Their academic work has often emerged from narrative and its offerings for black theory: an attendance to a time-place world that is not located in the exceptionalism of old ethnographies or the universalism of post-human white worlds.
Current art and/or research interest:
Neo is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled, Public Sex: Failure and post|colonial mediocrity in the biographical archive in which they use narrative as method. Neo deliberately imagines a fictional but experiential universe that convokes theories that might make life possible not only for those in the present moment but also for a past-future in which those often unhumaned and unanticipated might/might have exist/ed. Their work burden has been especially in bodies that fail, constantly and unwillingly: queer bodies, black bodies, female bodies and, and, and.
Their performance practice —often in public spaces — serves as both method and action, a confluence of the body at risk and the public as collaborator. Neo’s continuing creative writing work (as poetry; art writing; creative non-fiction, etc) emerges out of affect and survival. Where academic writing and artistic practice have bunged up the possibilities of affective exploration, poetry especially, as a form, avails itself as a radical imagination of the private work of public life. Sometimes thematic and other times slightly-above-madness, Neo’s writing dwells on uncertainty, imagining freedom, nodes in nightmares, memory and failure.
More about the artist: HERE