Research

Lisa is currently a PhD researcher at the Kingston University, School of Art in the Department of Critical and Historical Studies.

Working Project Summary

Working from the Limen: Cultural Intermediation, Agency and the Responsibilities of Representation

This practice-based, transdisciplinary research examines how artistic agency, authorship, biography and representation are negotiated through cultural intermediation. Centred on British Nigerian artist Nnena Kalu, who is autistic, learning disabled and has limited verbal communication, and ActionSpace, the supported studio facilitating her practice, it responds to a gap in critical discourse concerning the interpretation and representation of learning disabled artists. Specifically, it examines how cultural intermediaries negotiate these responsibilities where artistic practices are facilitated and conventional assumptions about communication, collaboration and intention cannot be taken for granted.

The research asks how cultural intermediaries might responsibly engage with artistic agency, facilitation, support structures and biography without redistributing authorship or reducing artistic meaning to explanatory narratives. Central to this enquiry is the role of biography in artistic representation. While biographical narratives can provide context, visibility and advocacy, they risk becoming overdetermining where artists are not positioned to shape, contest or publicly author accounts of how identity and lived experience inform their work. Rather than seeking to recover artistic intention, the research examines how artistic agency becomes perceptible, recognised and valued through processes of interpretation and representation.

As a curator and writer with a longstanding relationship with Kalu and ActionSpace, my practice is both the subject and method of inquiry. Through curatorial projects, critical writing, interviews and institutional engagements, the research examines how interpretative decisions and ethical responsibilities emerge and are negotiated in real time. Kalu's nomination and subsequent win of the 2025 Turner Prize provide both a significant case study and a catalyst for practice-based research, expanding the network of intermediaries involved in her representation and generating opportunities for direct participation in these processes. These activities intersect with Super Trouper (2026) and Curating and Coalition (2026), through which the developing research orientation is tested and refined.

Drawing on feminist, disability and decolonial theory, particularly María Lugones' conception of the limen, the research develops Working from the Limen as a provisional methodological orientation. Rather than applying liminality to Kalu or her practice, the limen offers a flexible position from which to critically examine the assumptions, relationships and responsibilities of cultural intermediation. Through iterative practice and reflexive analysis, this orientation informs the development of a model of practice that seeks to make visible the often-overlooked labour of facilitation and support, while explicitly situating the intermediary's own position and interpretative responsibilities without displacing artistic authorship. Advancing speaking alongside, rather than for, and praxical awareness as active ethical responsibilities, the model offers transferable approaches to negotiating the tensions between agency, biography, support and representation.

928 519