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Victoria Adukwei Bulley
VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held artistic residencies internationally in the US, Brazil and at the V&A Museum in London. A Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, her pamphlet Girl B (Akashic) forms part of the 2017 New-Generation African Poets series. She is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the recipient of a Technē studentship for doctoral research in Creative Writing.

Articles Available Online


On Water

Essay

Issue No. 29

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Essay

Issue No. 29

& we say to her what have you done with our kin that you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk...

Interview

Issue No. 26

Interview with Saidiya Hartman

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Interview

Issue No. 26

The first time I encountered Saidiya Hartman, she was a voice in salt., an award-winning play by artist and...

I’ve never been ghosted by a work of art before, but I guess there is a first time for everything On entering Martine Syms’s new solo exhibition at Sadie Coles, I am confronted by Mythiccbeing (2018), an enormous video installation comprised of hundreds of miniscule LEDs Intermittently, a phone number comes up on a screen with the words ‘text me’ and I’m promised that if I interact, this work will respond When people refer to a piece of art communicating with the audience it isn’t usually meant in the most literal sense, and in my case at least, I’m left clutching my phone anxiously waiting for a text back to: ‘Hi bbz… How are you? What are you thinking about RN? Hellooooooo’ As the message bubbles gently shift from blue to green I feel an involuntary sense of dread – it appears even a chat bot can crush your self-esteem   This could easily be a Machiavellian trick designed to compound the overarching sense of social anxiety that fills the gallery Mythiccbeing is undoubtedly the focus, featuring a complex three-dimensional rendering of Syms’s face which appears to be imbued with her own physical characteristics: a brief sigh, a gentle move of the lips or a slight turn of the head This vision is interspersed with a montage of mundane video clips, random blocks of text and found imagery, all of which coincide with Syms’s enigmatic voiceover She reels off seemingly inconsequential and classically millennial thoughts around sex, money and everyday drama, all conveyed in the kind of language you would share with your friends in a group chat, as well as trance-like sexual interrogations: ‘Girl you like that? Girl you like that?’   These rapid switchbacks between hyper-erotic speech and trivial chat perfectly mimic the splintered communication most of us engage with every day through an onslaught of texts, DMs, emails and phone calls Combined with Syms’s own image, it’s as if you are getting inside her head at that exact moment when it feels like the brain can’t take it anymore, and the notion of a ‘digital detox’ promises sweet relief   Mythiccbeing, is

Contributor

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Contributor

October 2018

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and...

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’

Book Review

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Book Review

October 2018

Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story...

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poetry

November 2016

Gentle

Harriet Moore

poetry

November 2016

Forgive me Sister for I have sinned it’s been seconds since my last confession. I sit in the dark...

feature

Issue No. 4

Tibetan Kitsch

Evan Harris

feature

Issue No. 4

I first glimpsed the Potala Palace behind the bending legs of a prostitute. She swayed, obscuring a vista of...

poetry

September 2013

Poems

Osip Mandelstam

TR. Robert Chandler

TR. Boris Dralyuk

poetry

September 2013

Osip Mandelstam was born in Warsaw to a Polish Jewish family; his father was a leather merchant, his mother...

 

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