Lexi C.M.K Turner is a PhD student in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She holds a BA in Film Studies from King’s College London and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. She engages in theories of mediation in the context of postmodernism, pessimism, mysticism and political philosophy, which she collates into a school of thought called “cultural thanatology.”
Lexi runs the “goth philosophy” blog Wyrdsystr, has hosted multiple consciousness-raising workshops on radical sobriety and has given papers on queer theory, cinema, sound studies, addiction, theology and ballet across the United Kingdom and Europe.
Outside academia, Lexi is best known as the frontwoman of the experimental rock band Lillian Gish and as the techno/jungle/avant-garde DJ Black, MA. She is currently making noise music under the monikers And The Maiden and Prayer Rope. From Ithaca, she retains her position as co-founder and programmer of monthly anarchist cinema series the LARC Film Club held at the London Action Resource Centre. In 2019, she was a reader and performer at multiple events of the Resilient & Resisting oral history, collaborative storytelling and queer archival project, at the Hackney Museum and Arcola Theatre.
Lexi plans to write her dissertation on mystical ontology in relation to visual, literary and sonic artistic processes of material and conceptual impossibility and decay.