Rosa Menkman Keynotes Failure & Resistance
The glitch artist and resolution researcher headlines the 16th International Illustration Research Symposium at Arts University Plymouth.
- When
- Nov. 13 to 14, 2026; online day Nov. 7
- Where
- Arts University Plymouth, Tavistock Place, Plymouth
Rosa Menkman delivers the keynote at Failure & Resistance, the 16th International Illustration Research Symposium, at Arts University Plymouth on Friday, Nov. 13. The organizers announced the keynote this week, introducing Menkman as a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions whose work tracks the noise artifacts of analog and digital media, and whose recurring protagonist, the Angel of History, is drawn from Paul Klee's 1920 monoprint Angelus Novus by way of Walter Benjamin. Watch a pass over Menkman's recent BLOB of Im/Possible Images below.
A pass over The BLOB of Im/Possible Images on New Art City, clipped from Rosa Menkman's video im/possible Images and the Latent Image space. The full version has sound.
The symposium is organized by practitioners and academics from the University of Exeter, Arts University Plymouth and Parsons School of Design, and runs in person on Nov. 13 and 14 with a separate online webinar day on Nov. 7. Its call takes Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure as a touchstone and asks what failing, unmaking and unlearning might offer illustration: "What happens when we look failure in the eye?"
An in-person ticket includes the online day, and a standalone online ticket is sold separately. The organizers also plan to fund low-cost places through supporters who pay an Angel Tier rate.
Menkman wrote Glitch Moment/um in 2011 and Beyond Resolution in 2020, won the Collide award at CERN in 2019, which seeded the im/possible images research, and ran the IM/POSSIBLE LAB at HEAD Geneva from 2023 to 2025. The BLOB of Im/Possible Images, a navigable version of that research, showed at V2_ in Rotterdam this month.
For more reading, see Killscreen on The BLOB at V2_, Killscreen's earlier piece on Menkman's glitch art and Menkman's site.
Killscreen tracks the keynotes, symposia and glitch-art shows at the edges of games that almost nobody else lists. Get the free Radar newsletter and hear about the next one in time to go.
