Artist-in-Residence: Vanessa Damilola Macaulay

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Vanessa Damilola Macaulay

Fall 2024

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Vanessa Damilola Macaulay

Vanessa Damilola Macaulay is a British artist scholar whose research is embedded in the practical and intellectual work of Black feminism. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute and is currently based in Chicago, US. 

In her research, she uses both practice-based and written approaches to challenge the imbalances of intersectional identities, speaking to contemporary struggles and anxieties about the performing Black body. Vanessa has performed across the UK and Europe, and her scholarly work has been published in Performance Research, Feminist Theory and Contemporary Theatre Review. Her manuscript in progress explores the critical and creative work imagined through body-based experimental performances and the specific historical, cultural, and material circumstances of Black women and our bodies to explore the strategies (both artistic and academic) for making and thinking about performance.

I wish to create a new project titled “Breathing Race into the Machine.” The title is taken from a book by Lundy Braun in which she “examine[s] the complex and contradictory historical processes by which differences such as race, class, and gender actually get embedded into the very architecture of scientific instruments” (p. xxi). When the machine was first invented in Britain, it was designed to address the health concerns associated with respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis, but the history of the spirometer reveals how it was used during the transatlantic slave trade to justify the inferiority and enslavement of Africans. Some physicians and researchers promoted the idea that Black people had inherently smaller lung capacity than White people, and therefore were more prone to respiratory illnesses.


While the spirometer represents innovation in medical research, simultaneously it is also used to justify racist stereotypes and discriminatory practices. I am proposing a project that examines the history of the spirometer along with my personal experience of asthma. In 2011, I was placed in an induced coma as a result of an asthma attack. I was in a coma for 7 days and during that time, medical staff and my family filled in a diary documenting the time. I would like to look at the diary as a source text for its specific documentation of time and action (or inaction) and the care that was embedded in the interactions with nurses who observed and cared for me 24 hours a day for the duration of 7 days. I’m hoping I will be able to look at other examples of doctor/ patient interactions through documentation at the IMSS that will inform my creative practice. I would like to make my own spirometer using the research conducted at IMSS to create a performance and exhibition. My intention is that ‘Breathing Race into the Machine’ allows for my body to time travel between the past, present and future creating some distance from its normative use, to produce differential results and meaning in the present.

My practice is embedded in the exploration between the body and flesh. The crimes against the flesh inflicted upon enslaved Africans who were branded as commodities reverberate through modern Black life today. In this context, my practice acknowledges the historical violences against Black people while also analysing the current material and social conditions of the body. This examination aims to understand the productive potential of Black flesh in art and performance. As explained, with a history of severe asthma, including an intensive care admission in 2011, I’m interested in the biomechanics of the breath. How does the machine breathe simultaneously with a body? What medical innovations have impacted the way we think about the lungs and breath more broadly?
Vanessa Damilola Macaulay
Artist in Residence, Fall 2024

Vanessa Damilola Macaulay Artist Statement:

As a Black British performance artist now based in Chicago, my artistic practice is a convergence of mediums—performance, video, photography—each serving as a lens through which I interrogate notions of belonging, memory, and resistance. While my earlier work delved into autobiographical narratives, I am currently driven by a profound interest in diasporic experiences in the UK, US and West Africa rooted in the sensual, corporeal, and the remembered. Central to my practice is the interplay of text and materiality, as I explore the possibility of language to shape perception and construct and deconstruct meaning. Through the manipulation of found objects and everyday materials, I play with the parameters of bodies in relation to objects. My work has been exhibited in the UK and Europe in theaters, and gallery and site-specific spaces.

My creative work seeks to situate the experiences of Black women including trans, queer and gender nonconforming folk in the face of our own annihilation. In doing so, I take seriously the parameters of safety and the possibilities to create work from the flesh. I’m influenced by the productivity of the flesh that defies easy consumption and instead requires audiences to excavate wounds. The conceptual shift from the body to the flesh represents the proximity to death that is inherent in Black life. The aim of my work is to offer breathing space in response to the suffocation of violent and oppressive systems. Central to Black feminist thinking of ‘imagining otherwise’, I seek to create worlds, environments, and experiences that respond to the feeling of liberation, and intersectional joy.

Examples of Work

Enticement Machine

Enticement Machine is a performance made for theatre spaces. The format of the performance follows a 'how-to' tutorial. The performance is a satirical rap video circus that distorts and negotiates the vision of the Black woman under the lens of pop culture and stereotypes. Drawing on music videos, make-up tutorials and twerking, Enticement Machine combines movement, spoken word and video to interrogate the hyper-sexualisation of the Black female body to the point of the absurd.

Made Not Born

An autobiographical performance made for theatre spaces. The performance depicts mother / daughter relationship. Through text, movement and video, I try to find a common vocabulary of understanding in my mums bodybuilding practice and my ballet practice.

8mins and 45 seconds

A collection of portraits Influenced by the 2020 pandemic and the plea for breath.

Between Stolen Breaths

To breathe goes beyond a simple biological function of life; it articulates a desire to exist in this body. Stolen Breaths is a performative ritual where movement is pushing, and stillness is breathing space. To sigh, gasp or pant is to know in my body the cost of air.

The Architect

Conceived by Mojisola Adebayo, Roy Williams and Matthew Xia, and created with a collective of leading Black artists including Bola Agbaje, Dexter Flanders, Vanessa Macauley and XANA. The Architect asks how we create a blueprint for the future, three decades after a seismic event in British history.  This celebratory and stirring immersive theatrical experience, taking place on a London bus in September, explores the lives of Black Londoners, imagines the potential of uninterrupted Black lives, and the hopes, ambitions and dreams that accompany them through performance, sound design, music and spectacle.

Learn more at https://www.vanessamacaulay.com/

About the Residency Program: As artistic practice occupies an increasingly pluralistic field, The International Museum of Surgical Science believes that artists are uniquely equipped to extrapolate on Museum collections in innovative ways and introduce novel perspectives to the institutional depiction of medical history. The IMSS Artist Residency Program provides working artists with:

  • Access to the Museum’s extensive collections and archive
  • Visibility on the Museum’s website and social media channels
  • A month-long capstone Solo Exhibition (or equivalent presentation) at the Museum

This project is partially supported by a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.

This project is supported, in whole or in part, by federal assistance listing number, 21.027 awarded to the International Museum of Surgical Science by the US Treasury through the American Rescue Plan Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds in the amount of $125,000.00, representing 83% of total project funding.

This project is partially supported by a Chicago Arts Recovery Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.

The International Museum of Surgical Science acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

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