Author Description

Energy Exchange is the first monograph of Julia Phillips. The artworks featured were created over the last decade, after Phillips moved from Germany to the United States, and reflect her interests in postcolonial studies, social belonging, diaspora, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, and Black feminist thought. The decision to have all texts translated into the artist’s first language, German, was led by her wish to contribute to an exchange of discourse and of culture between the English- and German-speaking regions in which her work is exhibited. The title describes a conceptual framework: taking its cues from Phillips’s sculptural practice, it implies something transactional, referring simultaneously to physical, mechanical, psychic, and spiritual exchange