Alisha Tsoumbou Ward

Alisha’s practice interrogates how image and persona are constructed, circulated, and consumed within contemporary visual culture, drawing on the language of performance and mass media to explore how visibility produces and regulates ideas of selfhood, desire, and authenticity.

Her thesis, The Myth and Medium of the Pop Star, considers the female pop star as a cultural form through which transformations in media power, industrial production, and fandom can be traced. Using textual and visual analysis, online discourse analysis, and platform/media ethnography, three dominant logics and systems emerge: performance, production, and optimisation. The research examines how female pop stars are positioned within these systems, and how their bodies, identities, and personas become key sites for negotiating cultural anxieties around control, sexuality, and authenticity.

She has contributed writing to The Body Is The Only Site, a collaborative project and installation which positions thinking as a biotic process, centring phenomenal consciousness at the level of the individual as the site of all knowledge.

Her own work, Pop Star Medium, is an extension of her thesis research, presenting her own photocard as a lo-fi repetitive field, reflecting on the manufacture of pop star image and the deliberate blurring between person and persona.