Denise Ferreira da Silva

Wall Scholar

Title

Professor & Director

Department/School

Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice

Faculty

Arts

University

UBC

Geographic Location

Canada

Denise Ferreira da Silva is Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice), and an Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts, at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and Visiting Professor of Law, at Birkbeck University of London. These invited academic affiliations reflect her multifaceted work. Among a small number of academics who have crossed over to the art scene, she has published in major academic journals, such as Theory, Culture & Society, philoSOPHIA,Theory & Event, Griffith Law Review. A respected figure in the international contemporary art scene, she receives frequent invitations to participate in, present at, and contribute to publications for, major events, such as 2016 Liverpool and Sao Paulo Biennales, the Venice 2017 Biennial, Documenta 14, the 10thBerlin Biennial, and 2019 Berlinale Festival. Her artistic practice collaborative works, such as the films 2016 Serpent Rainand 2018 4Waters-Deep Implicancy(with Arjuna Neuman) as well as the relational art practices Poethical Readings and the Sensing Salon(with Valentina Desideri).

Primary Recipient Awards

Denise Ferreira da Silva – Wall Scholars – 2019

As Wall Scholar, Denise Ferreira da Silva hopes to complete two projects, a book titled Blacklight and an experimental film titled Corpus Infinitum. Both are part of the groundwork for what she calls transformative theory of justice, which is a formulation of justice that focuses on the architectures, discourses, and effects of colonial, racial, and cis-heteropatriarchal violence. Both include thinking experiments and analytical tools inspired by black feminist thought, speculative and science fiction as well as findings and theoretical innovations in thermodynamics, electromagnetism, quantum physics, cosmology, and astrophysics.For instance, in Blacklightand Corpus Infinitum, experiments with ultraviolet and infrared radiation yield tools that expose the limitations of the existing theoretical and analytical arsenal for the critique of capitalism and inform the manufacture of tools that capture precisely what the existing critical tools render irrelevant (unintelligible), that is, the juridic, economic, and symbolic elements that indicate precisely how colonial and racial violence are constitutive of global capital.