Emily Roysdon

Emily Roysdon (born 1977) is a New York and Stockholm based artist and writer, currently a Professor of Art at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden.

Roysdon is a multimedia interdisciplinary artist, using performance, photography, print making, text, video, curating and collaboration as media for artistic expression.

In 2002 Roysdon helped co-found the feminist genderqueer artist collective and annual literary journal Lesbians To The Rescue (LTTR), which remained an active part of the queer art theory community until 2008. LTTR was dedicated to "highlighting the work of radical communities whose goals are sustainable change, queer pleasure, and critical feminist productivity." The other co-founders of the collective are Ginger Brooks Takahashi and K8 Hardy.

Roysdon developed the concept "ecstatic resistance" in 2009 to talk about the impossible and imaginary in politics. In her essay on the topic, Roysdon says, "Ecstatic Resistance is a project, practice, partial philosophy and set of strategies. It develops the positionality of the impossible alongside a call to re-articulate the imaginary. Ecstatic Resistance is about the limits of representation and legibility — the limits of the intelligible, and strategies that undermine hegemonic oppositions. It wants to talk about pleasure in the domain of resistance — sexualizing modern structures in order to centralize instability and plasticity in life, living, and the self. It is about waiting, and the temporality of change. Ecstatic Resistance wants to think about all that is unthinkable and unspeakable in the Eurocentric, phallocentric world order." In addition to her essay being published in Grand Arts and Toronto's C Magazine, the project also was inclusive of a "practice, partial philosophy, set of strategies, and group exhibition(s)" that were all organized and curated by Roysdon.

The two simultaneous sister shows were exhibited at Grand Arts (Nov. 13 - Jan. 16, 2010) and X Initiative in NYC (Nov. 21 - Feb. 6, 2010) and incorporated the art and performance of Yael Bartana, Sharon Hayes, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, My Barbarian, Jeanine Oleson, Ulrike Ottinger, Adrian Piper, Dean Spade and Craig Willse, A.L. Steiner, Rosa Barba, Juan Davila, Xylor Jane, My Barbarian in collaboration with Liudni Slibinai, Ulrike Muller, A.L. Steiner, Joyce Wieland, Leah Gilliam, Julianna Snapper, PIG/ Politically Involved Girls (Wu Ingrid Tsang, Zackary Drucker, and Mariana Marroquin), and Ian White. In the New York Times review of the exhibition, Roberta Smith wrote that "Ms. Roysdon’s title connotes a spirit of Zen activism, with absurdity substituting for ideology, but with politics still in the picture."

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