SpaceX: Artist talk by Melanie Jackson

Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague 
When: 5 June 2025 
Time: 17:00 – 18:30 hrs (doors open 16:30)
Subscribe via: Eventbrite
Partners: KABK MA Artistic Research 

On June 5, artist Melanie Jackson will present an artist talk about her research into profane and often overtly sexual medieval pilgrim badges from Dutch collections, and will present her latest book Aqueous Humours Fluid Ground.

In this artist talk, Melanie Jackson will introduce her research into profane, and often overtly sexual medieval pilgrims badges, held in Dutch collections. She works with an assembly of conceptual nomads to make sculptures of comic dissent, incendiary (colonial) trading histories, to a fascination with technoscience’s visions and chimeras. Her project Spekyng Rybawdy parades a multitude of joyfully itinerant and powerfully subversive characters straight out of medieval obscurity and into the flickering light of 21st Century gender politics, sexual diversity, structures of desire, social reproduction, consumption, power and State. Her work opens up an important lineage of visual methods of imagining alternative representational histories of social and sexual reproduction, as well as challenging ways such images may be used to uphold violences of control and exclusion. 

She will also launch a recent book Aqueous Humours Fluid Ground which she co-published with her project The Poorhouse Reading Rooms and Matts Gallery, London. It is a book that activates a watery mapping through practices of immersion, aquatics, time travel and the posthuman lenses of geological animal and machine vision. 

About the artist

Melanie Jackson (UK) is an artist and educator who works with modes of nonfiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image. Her work has a focus on bio-technologies, at shifting scales from the nanoscale to the planetary. There is a concern with abstractions and circulatory systems. Ur-formations. Polyphony. Exclusions. Intimacies. She draws out tales of excess and the absurd, and inventive ways of getting by. The gallery is used to stage different tactics of representation: mimicry, documentary, myth fabrication, science, performance, humour, animation, political commentary, music, installation, craft and the cultivation of aesthetic delight. 

SpaceX programme

As part of the SpaceX partnership project, Stroom Den Haag presents various lectures and workshops. SpaceX (Spatial Practices in Art and ArChitecture for Empathetic EXchange) is a European, transdisciplinary research network, responding to the disturbing rise of populist nationalism and conflict in European societies by engaging new audiences and forging a culture that embraces diversity, difference, and discursive exchange in cities and urban locations.