Culture Now: Joshua Simon

Joshua Simon gives a talk in relation to a newly commissioned text, Shockwork: the Selfie and the Labour of the Overqualified, with an introduction by Nimrod Kamer.

Simon examines the selfie and its recent emergence and proliferation, as a symptom of our late capitalist contemporary society. He observes that while consumerist needs of self-gratification and self-marketing continue to be pursued, other deeper issues such as mass unemployment and precarity fissure the fabric of today's society.

Joshua Simon is Director and Chief Curator at MoBY – Museums of Bat Yam, Israel. He is co-founding editor of Maayan Magazine for literature, poetry and ideas, Maarvon (Western) – New Film Magazine, and The New & Bad ArtMagazine, all based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Recent exhibitions include ReCoCo - Life Under Representational Regimes (co-curated with Siri Peyer) and Goods (co-curated with Liz Hagag).

Simon was a 2011-2013 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York, and is a PhD candidate at the Curatorial/Knowledge program at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the editor of Solution 196-213: United States of Palestine-Israel (Sternberg Press, 2011) and author of Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013).

Born in 1981, Nimrod Kamer is a journalist based in London. His career started in 2005 when he began to write for the financial newspaper Globes. Since moving to the UK in 2011, he has  worked for BBC Newsnight, The Guardian, VICE, Wired, Huffington Post, London Evening Standard and the The Daily Dot.