Rosa Abbott • Writing • Curating • About
August 2020
‘The Spectre of a World That Could Be Free’
Performance, ritual and response to Mark Fisher’s ‘Baroque Sunbursts’. Performed at ‘Meet Me in the Marshes’, Saturday 1 August 2020.
March – May 2020
‘Songs for the End’
A series of short texts on songs, published in Liquid’s online journal, ‘Warm Yourself By My Trash Fire’.
︎ Marvin Gaye, ‘Sexual Healing’
︎ Marie Davidson, ‘I Dedicate My Life’
︎ Marianne Faithfull, ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’
November 2019
‘You Want It Darker’
Catalogue essay for Liliane Tomasko’s solo exhibition dark goes lightly at Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, 21 October – 18 December 2019.
︎ Read an extract
︎ More information on the exhibition via Château La Coste
︎ Buy the book via Kerlin Gallery
October 2019
‘Curating the Club:
Curatorial Approaches to Club Culture’
Dissertation for MA Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins (2019).
︎ Read the Abstract
August 2019 | Paper Visual Art
‘Christopher Mahon’
Longform review-essay on Christopher Mahon’s Couched at Project Arts Centre and RGKS Cribs event.
︎ Read the essay via Paper Visual Art
June 2019 | Babette
‘Is there smoke in the room?’
Text-based artwork, included in I AM SO MULTIPLE IN NIGHTS, curated by Pádraic E Moore at The Pool, SB34, Brussels.
‘Is there smoke in the room?’ is a series of letters addressed to the experimental writer Anna Kavan (1901–1968), who tried to develop a form of ‘nocturnal writing’, governed by subconscious thought. I exhibited it under the pseudonym ‘Babette’.
Artist list: Mehraneh Atashi / Babette / Fiona Hallinan / Allen Jones / Graham Kelly / Perri MacKenzie / Liam Morrow / Gregory Polony / Sophie Varin.
︎ Read the text
︎ Exhibition leaftlet
February 2019 | Hyperallergic
‘An Intimately Filmed Portrait of a Willfully Fragmented and Mutable Persona‘
Review of GLUE by Oisin Byrne & Gary Farrelly, at CCA Goldsmiths
︎ Read the article via Hyperallergic
October 2018 | Babette
‘What’s Lutz Got to Do With It’
An essay about Lutz Bacher that ended up becoming an essay about Tina Turner
︎ Read it here
︎ About Babette
August 2017 | Babette
‘Radical Reinvention: The Making of Edwige Belmore’
An essay on model, punk musician and gatekeeper of 70s/80s nightlife Edwige Belmore, who burned all her clothes in a bid for self-invention.
︎ Read it here
︎ About Babette
August 2017 | Babette
‘Bobby “O”, Hi-NRG and the expression of queer desire’
An essay about The Flirts, why Hi-NRG disco is defensible, why Bobby “O” is queer (even if he’s not).
︎ Read it here
︎ About Babette
September 2014
‘Full Circle: The Pop Cultural Orbit of Theosophical Thought’
Catalogue essay for A Modern Panarion: Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin, curated by Pádraic E. Moore at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 19 June – 7 September 2014. The essay discusses artworks from the exhibition (by Derek Jarman, Gunilla Klingberg, Bea McMahon, Richard Proffitt, Garrett Phelan and Dorje De Burgh) in the context of the Theosophical Sociey, 70s sci-fi television shows and pop culture.
︎ Image via Peter Maybury
June 2014 | Totally Dublin #117
John Cooper Clarke interviewIn which I ask one of my all-time heroes, John Cooper Clarke, if he’s a bit of a romantic. I can still hear the Salford drawl of his reply: “To a SADISTIC degree, Rosa”
︎ Read the interview via Totally Dublin