In this paper I will be proposing an exquisite collision between the wild and the ritual body. Lucy Lippard tells us that ritual in art is a ‘restless opposition to the status quo’(1983). It can be a form of activism, but also a cathartic device for remembrance and witnessing. For Lippard its therapeutic effect can be a form of exorcism. When applied to contemporary art practice we see this exorcism as extraction, in which for instance the spectre of the historic feminine-as-nature trope is cast aside, but also simultaneously reclaimed. Posthumanism and New Materialism share a common thread here that looks to trouble what it means to be human and the sensibilities and binary distinctions that have sustained and policed us to date. Ritual then has become a posthuman affair. For it to be effective it is also material, and the skin-body of the artist is activated. From Erik Tidemann to Hanna Tuulikki, we see in contemporary art practice a new wave of fascination with alterity, which circles around neo-primitivism and an anthropological interest in indigenous cosmologies. Artists are taking up and using these ideas from beyond the west to critique and examine how we understand ourselves and our relationship to the non-human other, both land and critter.

• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/9319/