PhD | Joni Zhu

is a curator who works at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, cultural analysis. Her ongoing curatorial engagements are concerned with questions surrounding minoritarian discrimination and social injustice, opacity and the illusion of diversity, ecologies of care and decolonising nature, machinic conditioning and enslavement, pluralised and diasporic subjectivities, speculative fiction and inventive methods, multiple futures and the collapse of monoculture, decentralisation and alternative imaginations, organisational collaboration and cooperation. bjonizhu@gmail.com

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Joni Zhu is a curator who works at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, cultural analysis. Her ongoing curatorial engagements are concerned with questions surrounding minoritarian discrimination and social injustice, opacity and the illusion of diversity, ecologies of care and decolonising nature, machinic conditioning and enslavement, pluralised and diasporic subjectivities, speculative fiction and inventive methods, multiple futures and the collapse of monoculture, decentralisation and alternative imaginations, organisational collaboration and cooperation. bjonizhu@gmail.com

03.2023Chated with Xin Liu about her work and intimacy at the Courtauld. 02.2023Artforum/Bassam Al-Sabah: The seduction of CGI and the limits of the self 06.2022Silk, Wars, Asias in Viscose Journal. 06.2022Chaired the conference panel Life after the ruins: Precarity, labour, work infrastructures at UCL. 06.2022JSC Worldbuilding exhibition catalogue - Lawrence Lek, Nepenthe Zone 06.2022In dialogue with Lawrence Lek about friendships and futures. 04.2022I gave a talk on Bassam Al-Sabah's exhibition I AM ERROR at De La Warr Pavilion. 12.2021A Text on skin-ego, simulation and regenerative futurism for Jinseung Jang's solo show Réalité Simulée at Onsu Gonggan, Seoul. 10.2021CIRCA: Destination, Circulation, Where Are We Going? 09.2021I talked about technological optimism in relation to the COVID-19 machine on the panel discussion of Local/Translocal: The Reproduction of Technological Promise at Chinsenhale Gallery, London. 06.2021Currently on Vdrome 05.2021Plastic Love / 塑胶爱 02.2021I talked about how Advanced Practices in the arts explore, invent and restage knowledge formats at Visual Cultures Public Lecture, Goldsmiths, University of London 04.2020Submitted PhD thesis titled Cyber-Proletariat and the New Subaltern Space. 11.2019I started a post-doc role, working on the AHRC funded project Bio-Exempt. 09.2019I responded to Shanzhai Lyric’s "FREEDON (and on and on)" at the Women’s Art Library. 03.2019I produced a CGI film. 06.2018Latin America Subaltern Studies Group 10.2017I took part to organise (X) An Evening of Performances at DRAF. 09.2017I read Chinese Sci-fi for CAMPerVAN at Jupiter Woods. 03.2017I organised and presented at the International Curatorial Workshop: Curating and Social Change. 09.2016I contributed to An Anecdoted Archive of Exhibition Lives that was exhibited at Bergen Assembly, organised by freethought. 11.2015I started researching a PhD at Curatorial/Knowledge, Goldsmiths. 07.2015Black Box Formula. 01.2015Are we working too much? 10.2014I talked to Valerie Steele about obsessions. 05.2014Introspections is an artist moving image programme I curated in collaboration with LUX and BFI at London’s Picturehouse. 01.201413th Istanbul Biennial: Mom, Am I Barbarian? 05.2012An exhibition investigating creative resistance was curated and exhibited at the Guardian. 03.2012Circular Facts 03.2011I took part in the process of recovering and re-activating a pedagogic experiment: the ‘A’ Course with MayDay Rooms.

04.2020

Cyber-Proletariat and the New Subaltern Space

This research examines the condition of what has been called cyber-proletariat and the emergence of new subaltern spaces in globalised contemporary capitalism. It does so by engaging with the life of Tian Yu, who was 17-years-old when she worked as an iPad assembly worker at Foxconn in Shenzhen, China. In 2010, only 37 days into her first employment, Tian Yu attempted suicide. Shenzhen and the surrounding Pearl River Delta region are located in China’s Guangdong Province north of Hong Kong and are known as the “workshop of the world”, due to the industrialisation in the 1980s, as well as the technological industries whose recent rise has been linked with processes of migration and rural depopulation.

By investigating China’s socio-techno-economic development and its relation to cybernetic capital, this research recognises the constitution of a new subaltern space. This space is further examined by engaging with the singularity of Tian Yu’s life, and through a reading of her suicide attempt as an act of resistance. Two lines of enquiry are of central importance in this context: first, an enquiry into the formation and conditions of the cyber-proletariat by analysing the relation of cybernetic capital and class; and second, a discussion of the contemporary production of new subaltern spaces. This project takes Spivak’s ‘to be removed from the lines of social mobility’ as the point of departure for the recognition of Tian Yu’s subalternity. Given that departure, the research analyses the processes of suablternisation and proletarianisation through singularity with a view of machinic conditioning of the cyber-proletariat.