Bio

Darren Spirk is an artist, educator, and cultural worker whose image-based practice is focused around queer politics and poetics of spatiality.

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Their work is characterized by a meditative, reorienting use of the camera—under the weight of its many histories—to contest western progressivist notions of visibility and think through multiple, contingent forms of absence and presence in the image. As a theoretically-driven creative practice that elides normative approaches to subjectivity and self, their practice ultimately does not seek to humanize those who have been dehumanized but—to cite scholar Zakkiyah Iman Jackson—critique and move beyond the violent structures of humanity that are always already motivated by sexuality and race. Moreover, their work generates from aesthetics of opacity, obfuscation, and negativity to confront the tenuous frictions between a relational and anti-relational politic of queerness, asking: what can be salvaged from the excesses of sensual (dis)connection that lie in the ruins of an optic of permanence and language of unity?
 

They hold an MFA in Art from the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan and an MA in Gender and Women's Studies from the American University in Cairo. They previously served as an instructor of record at the University of Michigan, co-instructor of the socially-engaged art program Noon at Night, and teaching fellow at the Cairo Institute of the Liberal Arts and Sciences.