Valentine, is a new text based work by Monica Ross. Arising out of explorations that fuelled her performance work during the 1990s, valentine tenders an interface through which to encounter themes and theories propelled by Ross’s unfailingly investigative spirit.

The process of transformation, the shift that occurs when something becomes written is inherently part of the modification from voice to work, presence to an absence. For valentine is not solely a series of performance texts that occupy the printed page, they are a sequence of overlapping moments where temporalities interweave and are retraced, through a commitment that is re-routed through, underneath and over Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. This work ‘speaks’ of twentieth century European events, proving indexically bound to ongoing struggles. such as the Balkans, the ‘liberation’ of Eastern Europe, sexual politics, and against cultural effacement by the commodification of the work. What remains is a work, neither theory, nor fiction, or poetry as such, but one which points and prods, enticing your through a succession of female desires. that of the Madonna, that of Ida Bauer ‘Dora’, and ultimately that of the author, Monica Ross.