Amelia Groom, ‘Some Fragments for Beverly Buchanan’

Amelia Groom

Amelia Groom is a writer, art historian and theorist who is currently working on a book that looks at the art and antifascist activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore through the lenses of queer and trans ecologies. As part of the Afterall One Work series, Groom published a book on the Marsh Ruins (1981), a swampy environmental sculpture by the artist Beverly Buchanan, who made secretive and ruinous monuments to Black history in the Deep South of the US.

Other recent publications include essays on mud and decolonial ecologies; on Mariah Carey’s refusal to acknowledge time; on Scheherazade and the possibilities of ‘oblique parrhesia’; on queer, feminist and antiracist practices of gossip and ‘grapevine epistemologies’; and (co-authored with M. Ty) on the aesthetics and politics of rust.

Groom completed her PhD in Art History & Theory at University of Sydney, and was Postdoctoral Fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, as part of the ‘environs’ focus (2018-20). She was also Postdoctoral Researcher at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (2021-22), and has been teaching theory and writing on MFA programs at the Sandberg Institut in Amsterdam since 2014.

Together with Rachael Rakes, Groom co-edited the online journal No Linear Fucking Time (published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht). Groom’s research has often returned to questions of time: its undercurrents, its blockages and trickling detours, and the possibilities for its re-routing.