Dr Isabella Streffen

Isabella Streffen is an artist who currently lives and works in Northamptonshire, and is best known for her work on the cultural history and politics of perception, the encounter with the artwork and expanded art criticism. Her multi-modal, site-specific works and texts have been exhibited and circulated internationally. She studied at Sheffield Hallam University and the Courtauld Institute of Art before being awarded her doctorate by Newcastle University in 2012. 
Since 2013 she has held research fellowships and teaching posts at a range of institutions, and joined De Montfort as VC2020 Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in 2019. She teaches across Fine Art including art history, on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

Institute of Art and Design

‘Beyond The Ivory Tower: Impact and the Arts Practitioner’ in Research Impact and The Early Career Researcher ed. Bayley, Fenby-Hulse, Heywood & Walker (London: Routledge, 2019) 
‘The And Or Project: The Third Way’ in Artists, Academics, Museums, 21st Century Perspectives ed Kunny and Costache (New York: Routledge, 2018) pp176-190
‘The money shot: burning, falling, vanishing’ in Show Me The Money: the image of finance 1700 to the present ed. Crossthwaite, Knight and Marsh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 104-125
‘The Underlying Horror of the English Countryside’ in Dandelion vol 4 number 2 (London, 2013)
'A cosmic or elemental force enters the text as the flower blooms…Let it’ in On Care, eds Sharon Kivland & Rebecca Jagoe (London: Ma Bibliothèque, September 2020)
‘The Catalogue of Unsatisfied Desires’ in Do Not Make The, ed. Alice Bain & Elizabeth Reeder (Glasgow: MAP, 2018)
‘Turn right at the Statue of Love’ in The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, ed. Helen Clarke & Sharon Kivland (London: Ma Bibliothèque, 2017)
‘Veritas Temporis Filia’ in COBRA RES 1.9 Flash Fiction, ed. Theo Price (London: Cobra Press, 2015) 
Selected exhibitions
Camouflage: Art, Nature, War (Nov 2019-March 2020) FeliXart Museum, Brussels (curated Céline de Potter)
Radiophrenia 2019, CCA Glasgow
Goes To Print, (2019) Leicester Print Workshop 
Writing Skyscapes, (2019) Backlit, Nottingham & Cresswell Crags Visitor & Heritage Centre, Worksop
Viewing Pleasure (2018) Temporary Contemporary, Huddersfield
#exstrange (2017) hosted by Project Anywhere (curated by Rebekah Modrak and Maria-Laura Ghidini) 
Dreamlands, Immersive Cinema and Art 1905-2016, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016-17) 
Ways of Something (2018) Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Hanover Film Festival, Hanover (screenings); (2017) Flatpack Festival (screening); (2016) Art Athina (screening); Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; HeK, Basle (screenings); (2015) Moving Image Istanbul; Photographer’s Gallery, London: Transmediale, Berlin; Gray Area, San Francisco; Vivid Projects, Birmingham (screening); The Wrong Digital Art Biennial (2015); (2014) Western Front, Vancouver; Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam; Transfer Gallery, New York; Festival of Film Animation, Olomouc (screening)
The New Black at Resonate 2015 in Belgrade (curated by Nora O Murchú)
Library Interventions commissioned by LCA Library (2014, 2015) curated by Sharon Kivland, 
Hawk & Dove, (2014) The John F Kennedy Institute, Berlin (screening)
5x5 (2012) Washington DC’s inaugural public art festival for The Cherry Blossom Festival 2012.
Magnificent Distance, (2012) Globe Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
Requisite (2012), solo show, Alderman Fenwick’s House, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Art and curatorial practice; experimental, hybrid and art writing; cultural history of seeing and technologies of vision; site-specific practice; the aerocene (including drones); writing for practice-based research

Fine art; curatorial studies; contextual studies; Programme Leader MA Fine Art

PhD Fine Art, Newcastle University, 2012
MFA, Newcastle University, 2008 (Distinction)
BA (Hons) Fine Art: Combined and Media, Sheffield Hallam University, 2001 (1st)

BA studio practice; MA studio practice, research methods for creative practice

2020 Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award
2014 Newcastle Journal Award, best regional exhibition, Show Me The Money
2010 British Tourism Award, gold, Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall
2010 Newcastle Journal Award, best regional cultural event, Illuminating Hadrian’s Wall
2008 Axis MA Art Star

On Camouflage
This research expands Shell’s work on chameleonic camouflage (2012) to bring ideas of resubjectification through tourism and heritage into dialogue with contemporary theories of surveillance and military practice. The work is acutely topical in considering the relationship between screen/immersion, machine vision/reading and identity. 
The practice research and main element of this research was the production of two new artworks 'The Old Razzle Dazzle VR' (2019) and 'Dead Reckoning' (2019) which reconsidered existing works concerned with camouflage, to reframe them as immersive and resubjectified. 

Reading and Writing Art After The Internet
Reading and Writing Art After The Internet researches models of digital collaboration and the concept of the feedback loop. Co-production, orchestration, and group consultation produced cultural artefacts testing how the method of collaboration influences the outcome, and exploring architectures of power in exhibition and the internet.

Show Me The Money: image of finance
'Show Me The Money, the image of finance 1700 to the present' (2014-16) investigates the role of artists’ work in curatorial practice (the artist-curator position) through the creation of a collective 300 year image of finance, in four exhibitions and a book chapter. It formed part of an AHRC/Arts Council England funded project by the same name, led by PI Dr Peter Knight (University of Manchester). 

Experimental, Hybrid and Art Writing
This practice research challenges the relationship between art object and art criticism, whose methodologies and approaches are traditionally derived largely from history and philosophy of art. It uses the concept of ‘texts that run parallel to or within art’ (Williams, 2015) and ‘texts which operate as art’ (Maroto, 2020) to explore methods of coming to knowledge about new forms of art, complicating the relationships between the visual/textual and the object/interpretation. 
The works are ‘form-curious’, ‘unsummarizable’ and ‘genre-bending’ (Reeder, 2017) explorations of this space between the analytic and the creative through techniques of collage, the critical-creative and the fictocritical. The texts have differing or multiple modes of publication: by algorithm; exhibition; broadcast; print media; performance; online magazine and article.

2020 ‘Proposals for Enchantment’, Writing/Performance, Royal College of Art, London
2019 ‘Razzle Dazzle ‘Em’, Contemporary Artists and Camouflage, New Perspectives on Camouflage, FeliXart Museum, Drogenbros-Brussels
2017 ‘Dronology: a taxonomy of drones’, Aerial Art Vehicles, College Art Association Annual Conference (CAA), New York
2015 ‘Britain from Above: Camoufleurs and Contemporary Art’, Modern Wars, Revolutionary Cartographies, MSA 17, Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Boston
2014 ‘The Third Way: the And Or Project’, Finding Common Ground: Academics, Artists and Museums, College Art Association Conference (CAA), Chicago, with Siofra McSherry
2014 ‘Drones baby Drones’, Trust Issues: Community, Contingency and Security in North America, John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität, Berlin (keynote)
2014 ‘Surreptitious Networks: the human residue of networked practices’, AHRC Cultural Engagement showcase, University of Liverpool
2013 ‘The Underlying Horror of the English Countryside’, Silent Spring: Chemical, Biological and Technological Visions of the Post-1945 Environment, Centre for Modern Studies, University of York
2013 ‘Field craft: the intersection of tools, theories and tactics in pursuit of an artistic objective’, Practice-led Research, Baltic 39
2013 ‘Dark on the Rock: fictions of the Cold War’, Cold War Unlimited, University of Sheffield
2010 ‘Dead Reckoning: snipers, artists and the myth of scopic control’, Thinking, Doing & Publishing Visual Research: The State of The Field, International Visual Sociology Association, University of Bologna
2007 ‘Chora: reclaiming visible light in 4800 parts’, Power and Space: Transforming The Contemporary City, CRASSH, University of Cambridge