CHRISTEN CLIFFORD
Christen Clifford is a feminist, performance artist, writer, curator, professor, and mother. Much of Clifford’s artwork is documentarian. Though Clifford plays with the boundaries of Instagram, she doesn’t consider herself an “Instagram artist”. Instead these digital constraints shape her works presentation. From aspect ratio cropping to character limits to relational hashtagging, the artist riffs on these structures to develop a public archive.
In 2016, Clifford was diagnosed with ovarian and uterine cancer. She began documenting her experience including recording her mammograms and surgeries. Clifford posted images of her experience to Instagram. Many of these images were abiding by Instagram’s policies, yet were still deleted. She thinks her works were removed due to her text and hashtags (like #fuckcancer, #IHateCancer and #vagina). These words may be highly scrutinized and therefore penalized by Instagram. Clifford found that pictures of her face with happy words got much greater interaction, but realistic posts of her struggle with cancer were quelled. Since Instagram’s Shadow Ban algorithm is a black box it is hard to know for sure what is happening.
Clifford’s relationship with social media censorship goes back almost 15 years. At that time Facebook removed images of mothers breastfeeding, calling them “obscene”. The artist was an early lactivist fighting for the normalization of breastfeeding. Her work continues to explore feminist body politics with a recent installation of menstrual blood collected from cis, trans and non binary humans displayed in perfume bottles.
I Want Your Blood, Installation view Eva Presenhuber 2020
IMAGE CREDIT: All Images Courtesy The Artist