Roman Vasseur

Dr Roman Vasseur | Kingston University London

My artwork appropriates cinematic and political narratives to create installations and works that engage the forceful materiality of these fictions. Whether it is transporting a crate of earth from Transylvania to Los Angeles or disinterring a town’s original masterplan as a political theology and material fiction, past work has constructed scenarios around which the ‘social’ materialises as an unstable, mythological figure — a figure that cannot be looked upon directly but remains forceful, nonetheless. I have exhibited in the UK at Cubitt Gallery, the ICA and the Austrian Cultural Foundation (London) as well as in Dublin, Hamburg and Los Angeles for example. The 2008-2011 project Let Us Pray for Those Now Residing in the Designated Area arose from my role as Lead Artist for a British postwar New Town commissioned to help revise the town’s masterplan and innovate processes of urban planning.

I completed my PhD in art at Goldsmiths College in 2018. Entitled I am the Sun and Cannot be Gazed upon Fixedly the research claimed that contemporary art and cultural production, more broadly, are irrevocably changed now that the forceful information logic of the financial derivative is seeded in and transmitted by culture's objects. Examples of cinema from the early 1970s onwards were used to affectively map how the spectral, but impactful, reign of the financial derivative has taken hold, and how its violent rearranging of time and space can be rethought.  

I have published writings with Urbanomic Press and Mute Magazine and presented lectures and participated in panel discussions at Tate Britain and the ICA.My research extends into the fields of urbanism, informatics, cognition, posthumanism, cinema, feminist literary criticism, medievalism and political philosophy.

I am Course Leader for the Fine Art MFA at Kingston University, London as well as lecturing elsewhere in the UK and abroad. I conduct PhD supervision and welcome practice-based PhD projects from artists whose area of research overlap with my own.