Book Launch | Half-light: Notes on Violence from the Trans Underworld
Join us for the launch of Half-Light: Notes on Violence from the Trans Underworld, with Kitt Peacock. The event will combine a short talk and readings from the book with a drop-in social practice activity from the Centre for Near Life Research.
Half-light: Notes on Violence from the Trans Underworld emerges in the wake of rising social and political violence against trans communities. When trans life becomes a form of death-in-waiting, what can we learn from making kin in the underworld? Poisoned wetlands, violent landscapes, and trans ancestors gather in the essays; marked by their ongoing proximity to harm, their perspectives offer queer communities urgent strategies of resistance through opacity, disorientation, and national reckoning.
Half-light collects outcomes from a two year long performance and image-making project through the Centre for Near Life Research.
Kitt Peacock is an artist-researcher from O’odham Jeweḍ (Arizona), currently working on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ nations. Their practice is centred around the creation and maintenance of trans worlds and considers how violent conditions can be redeployed as the very material of trans life. Peacock’s current work with the Centre for Near Life Research forges alliances with non-living relations—contaminated waterways, lethal algae blooms, and sites of harm—in order to discover new strategies of queer resistance.
They hold an MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia (2024). Their work, which bridges social practice, installation, and artist publishing, has appeared at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Los Angeles), the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and the 2024 Dakar Biennale.