Skin in the Game

Skin in the Game follows on from the acclaimed fieldwork diary, The Metabolic Museum. In this new book, Clémentine Deliss expands on how artists understand risk and contention both in their work and with regard to historical collections. Through a series of compelling conversations, questions are raised on how to work on colonial collections through the concept of the “prototype” as generative of a multiplicity of non-exclusive interpretations. The book includes interviews with leading women artists spanning two generations—Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Andrea Zittel—in which they discuss that moment of “skin in the game,” when each of them took the decision to become an artist, to enter the Hades of an uncertain existence and the Heaven of aesthetic experiment. What was the prototype that defined their career and their life’s trajectory, that like a revenant returns over the course of an artist’s lifetime?

CLÉMENTINE DELISS (*1960, London) is an independent curator whose practice crosses the borders of contemporary art, critical anthropology and curatorial experimentation. She is internationally recognized for her seminal work on the Post-Ethnographic, on African modernism, and for her interventionist practices in art. She is Honorary Global Humanities Professor of History of Art at the University of Cambridge, and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.