Qualeasha Wood Performance at The Victoria & Albert Museum

On Friday 19 September 2025, Qualeasha Wood will present her performance Attention Economy as part of the V&A Friday Late program. The Victoria and Albert Museum will be open from 6-9pm for the event. 

 

 

In this performance, Wood enacts the state of “bed rotting”—a phenomenon where prolonged rest blends with digital overstimulation—providing a commentary on how selfhood and identity are increasingly shaped online by technology. 

 

Central to Wood’s artistic practice are themes of glitch art, body horror, and consumerism, expressed through video, tapestry and performance. In this durational piece, Wood’s continuous engagement with her phone—doomscrolling, selfie-taking, applying filters— mirrors the familiar act of contemporary digital interaction and reflects on collective online behaviour spanning compulsion, fatigue, vanity, insecurity, desire and consumption.

 

Wood's work situates the Black femme body as a site of both spectacle and exploitation, particularly within digital economies. Her deliberate performance of passive engagement contrasting with hypervisibility, echoes critical feminist perspectives on hysteria, neurosis, and the historical treatment of female and Black bodies.

 

Qualeasha Wood (b. 1996, Long Branch, NJ, lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) is 

an interdisciplinary artist whose work contemplates realities around black female ontology that do and might exist. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint and internet avatars Wood's tufted and tapestry pieces mesh traditional craft and contemporary technological materials. Together, Qualeasha navigates both an Internet environment saturated in Black Femme figures and culture, and a political and economic environment holding that embodiment at the margins. For her what are intuitive combinations of analog and cybernetic compositional processes make for a plainly contemporary exploration of Black American Femme ontology. 

This event is supported by the V&A Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project.