Queen for a Day is Deborah-Joyce Holman’s debut publication, staging a conversation between two of the artist’s films, Moment and Moment 2 (2022), and the work of cinema verité they take as a primary material: Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967). One ‘queen’ of this title is Jason Holliday, the Black gay male subject at the centre of Clarke’s film with whom Holman wants to act in solidarity. Finding Jason captured by the extractive gaze and exhausting line of questioning of a white female director, Holman works to reproduce his words, rather than his image, placing them as looping samples of script in the mouths of two performers, Imani Mason Jordan (Moment) and Rebecca Bellantoni (Moment and Moment 2). The loop is intended to be liberatory, a way of paying homage to Jason’s utterances via repetition, and to render them abstract and opaque, allowing the new script – included in this book as a series of textual interludes – to function as camouflage.

The publication contains extensive representation of Moment and Moment 2 as still images, added to which are installation views of the films’ presentation at the ICA, London, schwarzescafé, Luma Westbau, Zürich, and Cordova, Barcelona. Following this a conversation between Deborah-Joyce Holman and Cédric Fauq elaborates on Holman’s method, and suggests that there are parallels to be drawn between the cycle of oppression in which Jason is trapped by Clarke, and the way in which the contemporary circulation of images of Black people suffering triggers a retraumatising process of spectacularisation. Newly commissioned essays by Olamiju Fajemisin, Noémi Michel, and Francis Whorrall-Campbell, offer close analysis of Moment and Moment 2, opening up diverse ways of understanding Holman’s aesthetic strategies and politics of representation via film history, decolonial and queer theory.

Deborah-Joyce Holman is an artist based between London and Basel. Their work has recently been shown at Performing Arts Forum, Saint-Emre (2023), Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Castellón (2023), and Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich (2023), among others. They were Associate Director at Auto Italia, London (2020–22), and Founding Director of 1.1, a platform for multidisciplinary early-career practitioners with an exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland (2015–20).

Our book of the month, with 30% off until the end of July, is The Unspeakable Freedom Device by Jennet Thomas (2015).

‘This is your new device. The purpose of this device has been re-defined, but this was gradual, so you did not notice. This device likes you. It excites with simplicity, it cuts, lifts and separates, then hollows out the centre, making ready for the enrichment mechanisms to enter…’ – Jennet Thomas, from the Prologue

Margaret Thatcher is the spectral protagonist in this dystopian folkloric work; she exists as an all-pervasive image burnt onto the collective memory of a culture that is sinister and psychedelic, ‘savage’ and ritualistic. The characters are released, and we follow two impoverished pilgrims, Glenda and Mary, through a red, green and blue broken landscape. Signs have collapsed and meaning has imploded: Mary needs to find a cure for her baby; Glenda wants to help, but appears to have another agenda. Their profound disorientation leaves them unsure of which route to choose. Red, blue, or green? All roads seem to lead to Blupool. There the device is to be renewed, and the fateful implosion occurs. The colours rotate, the fiction loops, and the pilgrims must start their search again.