Stephen Barber
Publications & Exhibitions
Books
Stephen is the author of many single-authored books, including Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (1993: Faber UK, Farrar Straus & Giroux USA),Fragments of the European City (1995: Reaktion UK/USA), Weapons of Liberation (1996: Faber UK, Farrar Straus & Giroux USA), Extreme Europe(2001: Reaktion UK/USA), Tokyo Vertigo (2001: Creation UK/USA), Projected Cities (2002: Reaktion UK/USA), Genet: Pages Torn from the Book of Jean Genet (2004: Reaktion UK/USA), The Art of Destruction: the Films of the Vienna Action Group (2004: Creation UK/USA), The Vanishing Map (2006: Berg UK/USA), Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (2006: Solar/Chicago University Press UK/USA), The Tokyo Trilogy (2008: Creation UK/USA), Artaud: Terminal Curses: The Notebooks (2008: Solar UK/USA), Cities of Oblivion (2009: FF Publications), and Abandoned Images: Film and Film's End (2010: Reaktion). His books have been translated into many languages, most recently into Spanish, Japanese and Turkish. He has also written many essays for art magazines, including Artforum International and Art in America, and for art catalogues, including a recent catalogue on the work of the Spanish photographer Xavier Ribas, Sanctuario (2006: Gili Spain); he is a regular contributor to Vertigo film-magazine. He has given many tv, radio and press interviews on his research, worldwide.
Current Research
Stephen's recent research, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Program and the subject of his period as a Visiting Professor at the California Institute of the Arts, on the abandoned cinemas of the Broadway area of Downtown Los Angeles, and on the transformation and re-use of filmic space once the presence of film has evanesced, was published in 2010 as a monograph, 'Abandoned Images: Film and Film's End' (Reaktion). It was favourably reviewed in the TLS and other publications. During the 2009-2010 academic year, he was a Fellow of the Henkel Foundation and the DAAD in Berlin, researching a project about the multiple imprintation, of history, memory and corporeality, into the urban surfaces of Berlin, through images from film and art works; the resulting book, 'The Walls of Berlin: Urban Surfaces: Art: Film', will be published by Solar/University of Chicago Press in Spring 2011.
Stephen is currently a Research Fellowship holder of the Leverhulme Trust, from October 2010 to September 2011, researching a new project about Eadweard Muybridge's scrapbooks, early moving-image projection, and processes of digitisation.
Lectures
Stephen has given many public lectures and talks on his research, at such venues as the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Setagaya Public Theatre (Tokyo), the Museum of Modern Art (Vienna), UCLA (Los Angeles), the New School for Social Research and the Japan Society (New York City), the Casa delle Letterature (Rome), and the Royal Academy, the ICA, the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern (London).
He has collaborated with the Director of the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Professor Fran Lloyd, since 2000, on a range of Japan-related projects such as Consuming Bodies: Sex and Japanese Art (2002: Reaktion UK/USA) and the ongoing Art of Intervention project.
Stephen is a series editor for Reaktion Books' Locations series with Professor Barry Curtis, and an associate editor for Solar Books.
He has supervised six PhD theses to completion, including projects incorporating practice-based elements, on topics such as performance art and deafness, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty films, Antonin Artaud's arts-theories, and contemporary archival practices.
Stephen has received numerous awards and prizes for his research