IN MEMORIAM
Marina Vishmidt
(1976 -2024)

Marina Vishmidt (1976-2024) was a American writer, editor, and critic born in Kharkiv in the former Soviet Union. She was Professor of Art Theory in the Department of Art Theory, University of Applied Arts, Vienna until April 2024. She was a fellow at the Leuphana Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture and Society, Lüneburg, 2024, held the Rudolph Arnheim Guest Professorship in Art History, Humboldt University, Berlin, April–September 2022 and held a Visiting Professorship at the Department of Critical and Cultural Theory, Södertörn University, Stockholm, September 2020. She was a lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London 2016–2023 and taught art theory at the Netherlands Art Institute in Arnhem 2014–2018.

Marina’s theoretical work was primarily concerned with the connection between art, value, and labour, focusing on the increasing dissolution of international financial markets and their influence on subjectivation in the artistic field. Developing these common themes over a number of collaborations Marina wrote regularly with interlocutors Melanie Gilligan, Anthony Iles, Zoe Sutherland and Kerstin Stakemeier and developed writing, public talks and other collaborations with artists Em Hedditch, Anja (AKA Blaise) Kirschner & David Panos, Karolin Meunier, Grace Schwindt, Ruth Buchanan, Melissa (AKA Caye) Castagnetto, Melanie Gilligan, Melissa Gordon, as well as her partner, poet Danny Hayward. Vishmidt published her writing in magazines and journals such as Mute, Afterall, Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, Texte zur Kunst, Ephemera, Kaleidoscope, Variant and OPEN!. She was on the editorial board of the book series New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society (Bloomsbury Academic) and the journal South as a State of Mind. Publications include: Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2018), Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (2016). Marina engaged with the social consequences of the 2007–8 financial crisis through imaginative language and writing; and reexamined risk, organisation and contingency in Look at Hazards, Look at Losses (2017) with Anthony Iles and Group for Conceptual Politics published by meta-mute and kuda.org. The anthology Speculation (2023) edited by Marina for the Whitechapel and MIT Press series Documents of Contemporary Art developed her monograph Speculation in directions illuminated by both science and social fiction.

As a board member for WAGE (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), a member of the Marxism in Culture collective, through reading groups, discussions and her activity as a trade unionist with Goldsmiths UCU Marina continued to develop her practical and theoretical politics marked, as ever, by singularly memorable contributions to collective engagements with labour, work refusal, feminism and social reproduction.

Marina Vishmidt Collected Works was created on Memory of the World pages, in loving memory of Marina.