Dr Josephine Berry
- Tutor (Research)
- Arts & Humanities MPhil/PhD
Dr Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and editor. She teaches on the Contemporary Art Practice MA and supervises practice-based and thesis-only PhDs in the School of Arts & Humanities.
Josephine Berry has a background in aesthetic politics with a particular focus on the intersections between art, site and (bio)power. She has researched and written on art’s relationship to globalisation, digital networks, neoliberalism and climate crisis. She is currently focused on the relationship between art and strategies of degrowth.
She was Editor of Mute magazine, a print and online forum for ‘cultural politics after the net’, from 2004–14 and co-director of the Post-Media Lab, Centre for Digital Culture, Leuphana University, Germany (2012–14). She teaches on the Digital Media MA at Goldsmiths, University of London and has taught courses in Visual Culture at Imperial College. Her educational background includes an MA in German Expressionism at The Courtauld Institute, and a PhD thesis on Site Specific Art on the Net at Manchester University. Publication venues include Afterall, e-flux, Inventory, Mute, New Formations, Kunstlicht, The Large Glass and 21: Inquiries into Art, History and the Visual.
More information
Research interests
Her latest book, Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse (Sternberg 2025) considers art’s ability to turn societies away from ‘capitalist realism’ and towards Gaia, our crisis rocked planetary home. With chapters on environmental feeling and sensation as transformative capacities, the rupture of petro-modernity, eco-aesthetic communes, and migration politics, the book considers the urgent ecological focus of contemporary art practice.
Her book Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry (Sternberg 2019) asks how and why autonomous art became such a vital and pliant tool for neoliberal forms of governance. This question developed out of an earlier enquiry into art’s capacity for negativity and critique within the neoliberal city and culture-led regeneration schemes, published as the book No Room to Move: Radical Art in the Regenerate City which she co-authored with Anthony Iles (Mute, 2010).
Current research
Josephine is currently researching art, degrowth and strategies for decarbonising the imagination.
External collaborations
Josephine Berry also teaches in the Media Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a member of Mute magazine’s editorial collective Mute and is a peer reviewer for the journal Theory, Culture & Society.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Books
Berry, Josephine. 2018. Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry. Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press
Berry, Josephine and Iles, Anthony. 2010. No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City. Mute Publishing Ltd.
Edited book
Berry, Josephine and van Mourik Broekman, Pauline, eds. 2009. Proud to Be Flesh: A Mute Anthology. Mute
Co-edited with Clemens Apprich, Anthony Iles & Oliver Lerone Schultz for Post-Media Lab 2014. Plants, Androids and Operators: A Post-Media Handbook, Mute Books & PML
2014, Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks, Rodrigo Nunes, Mute Books & PML
2014, Irational.org’s Traum, irational.org, Mute Books & PML
2013, Digital Solidarity, Felix Stalder, Mute Books & PML
2013, Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, Mute Books & PML
2013, Human Strike Has Already Begun & Other Writings, Claire Fontaine, Mute Books & PML
Book section
Berry, Josephine and Iles, Anthony. Forthcoming 2020. 'From Isolation to Exultation: the Spatial Situation of the Artist’s Studio from Industrial Modernity to Financialisation.' In: Ana Vilenica and Elena Marchevska, eds. Art and Housing Struggles: Between Art and Political Organizing. Bristol/London: Intellect Books/LADA.
Berry Slater, Josephine. 2015. 'Dis-Embodying Regeneration.' In: ed. Alex Frost: Property Guardian. London: Flat Time House, pp. 45-50.
Articles
Berry, Josephine. 2020. 'How to Explain Pictures to a Dying Human: On Art in Expanded Ontologies.' The Large Glass Magazine(27/28), pp. 7-18.
Berry, Josephine. 2016. 'Agents or Objects of Discontinuous Change? Blairite Britain and the Role of the Culturepreneur. Kunstlicht;, 36(1), pp. 25-33. ISSN 0921-5026
Berry, Josephine. 2015. 'Everyone is Not an Artist: Autonomous Art Meets the Neoliberal City.' New Formations, 84/85, pp. 20-40. ISSN 0950-2378
Berry, Josephine. 2012. 'The Ghosts of Participation Past', a review of Claire Bishop's Artificial Hells. Mute,
Berry, Josephine. 2012. 'Orgy of the Non-Self', a review of Yayoi Kusama. Mute, 3(3).
