Emily Roysdon
Emily Roysdon (1977) is an artist and writer. Her working method is interdisciplinary and recent projects take the form of performance, photographic installations, print making, text, video, curating and collaborating. She is editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective, LTTR. Her many collaborations include lyric writing for The Knife, and JD Samson & MEN; costume design for choreographers Levi Gonzalez, Vanessa Anspaugh and Faye Driscoll; and performance in Boris Charmatz's Expo Zero.
2008-2010 Roysdon developed the concept "ecstatic resistance" to talk about the impossible and imaginary in politics. The concept debuted with simultaneous exhibitions that Roysdon curated at Grand Arts in Kansas City, and X Initiative in New York. The essay has been translated into Spanish, German, Czech, and Maori languages.
The years 2013 through 2017 Roysdon has been developing Uncounted, a site-specific project that has unfolded through a series of related questions and visual vocabulary. At the core of the project is a 23 part text that engages a vocabulary of movement, margins, and trespass. It is about what is “unseen in time,” alive time, and the politics of transitions. Drawing on texts by W.H. Auden, David Hammons, and Gertrude Stein, the text considers “uncounted experience,” what is “beyond the will to measure,” posing such questions as “What is time if not activism?” and “What instruments have we?” The 23 short pieces which are by turns abstract, poetic and political.
Recent solo projects include new commissions from Tate Modern, London; Secession, Vienna; Kunsthalle Lissabon; PARTICIPANT, INC, NY; If I Can't Dance and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Visual Art Center, Austin; and The Kitchen, NY.
Roysdon's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Gwangju Biennale, Moderna Museet, Museo Serralves, Whitney Biennial, Greater New York at MoMA PS1; The Generational, New Museum; Sydney Biennale; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid amongst many others. In 2012 Roysdon was a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize, exhibiting in Kiev and the Venice Biennale.
Roysdon's work is in the public collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and The New York Public Library's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York.
Since 2013 she is a Professor of Art at Konstfack University of Art, Craft, and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. During Fall 2016-17 she was the invited DAAD Guest Professor at University of the Arts Bremen, and since 2017 she is a visiting adjunct at Columbia University’s MFA program. Roysdon completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an Interdisciplinary MFA at UCLA in 2006.