FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur
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Operation Video. The Use of Images as Visual Agents in Struggles over Representation
Get PDFThis paper focuses on the notions of the gaze and proximity in visual culture, and their relation to the sense of distancing on the one hand and tactile sensations on the other. Jean Baudrillard, a representative agent of postmodernism, argues in his video studies that the circulation of electronic images causes external reality as a subject to vanish. For Baudrillard, the screen aesthetics of close-ups have an inherent obscenity, which he compares with the effect of gender change as a disturbingly unstable notion. Based on the analysis of various video works, among others by Lisa Steele, Lili Dujourie, Lynn Hershman, Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin, this paper argues that some of these works, above all those from the 1970s, run counter to Baudrillard’s basic claim. Rather than foregrounding a dissolving or vanishing subject, these works feature a subject that discovers itself – albeit differently. Discussing selected examples of early video discourse, and its different mode of seeing, the paper delineates some of the shifts that have occurred in the discourse on subjectivity.This essay is based on my doctoral dissertation (Operation Video. Eine Technik des Nahsehens und ihr spezifisches Subjekt: die Videokünstlerin der 1970er Jahre. Bielefeld, Transcript, 2008). The present version was first delivered at the ASCA Workshop Engaging Objects at the University of Amsterdam in March 2008, and has not been previously published in English
Patterned Modernity: The Role of Women in the Production of Textiles and Contemporary Art in Nigeria
Get PDFThrough the modern history of the indigo-dyed textile adire, produced by the Yoruba in southwest Nigeria, this essay examines the relationship between the production of the textile, the gendered divisions of its production, the development of modernity, and the appropriation of textiles by artists working in Nigeria since the time of independence. The essay presents the argument that a close look at the role adire played in pre-independence decades will reveal that its women dyers were actively involved not only politically and socially in colonial resistance, but also as the producers of visual culture: they expressed themselves aesthetically through the textile pattern. Finally, the textile’s intimate connection to the construction and preservation of memory in Nigerian society is considered as a motive for the appropriation of its pattern language by several of Nigeria’s prominent modern and contemporary artists
Das sehende Geschlecht. Repräsentationskritik und Affekt in Alicja Żebrowskas Video 'The Mystery is looking' im Kontext postsozialistischer Sexualitätsdiskurse in Polen
Get PDFSex is Looking: Representational Critique and Affect in Alicja Żebrowska’s Video The Mystery is Looking within the Context of Post-Socialist Discourses on Sexuality in Poland This paper analyses The Mystery is Looking, a video produced in 1995 by the Polish artist Alicja Żebrowska. The video presents a close-up of the artist’s vulva being transformed into a strange looking eye staring at the viewer. With this shocking sight, the artist subverts the tradition of the viewer as a panoptic voyeur dominating the object of his gaze. The work’s critical potential therefore lies in its ability to affect the viewer. Żebrowska’s work intervenes in post-communist debates over the ban on abortion, a discourse that sought to control female sexuality in order to push women into the domestic sphere of the family. This strategy excluded women not only from the labor market but systematically excluded them from economic-political participation and publicity. The central theme of Żebrowska’s artistic work are the constraints of female sexuality and the objectifying mechanisms of conventional representations of women in art
'Race, Gender und Whiteness.' Einige Überlegungen zur Intersektionalität
No full textThe article discusses intersections of race and gender using the example of the United States of America as a special case for the interrelatedness and differences of race- and gender discrimination as known as racism and sexism. Special emphasis will be placed on the history of the term intersectionality in black feminism and the category of Whiteness as unmarked universalism in the post-slavery US. The concept of Whiteness will then be developed in comparison to post-colonial European race-relations. Whiteness as travelling theory in Germany for instance is in need of some cultural translation. The term occidentalism is hereby offered to describe the local brand of cultural supremacy. Finally Queer Theory is implicated to promote a kind correcting mode to hold possible binarism of intersectionality in check and offer a more fluid and flexible approach of thinking of and fighting against discriminating differences and considering possible privileges.Der Artikel diskutiert die Intersektionalität von Race und Gender. Er bezieht sich dabei zunächst auf den Spezialfall USA und die dortige Beziehungsgeschichte von rassistischen und/oder sexistischen Diskriminierungen. Dabei wird insbesondre die Rolle herausgearbeitet, die afroamerikanischer Feminismus bei der Begriffsbestimmung Intersektionalität gespielt hat und gleichzeitig eine Kritik an Whiteness als unmarkiertem Universalismus in den USA nach dem Ende der Sklaverei entwickelt. Letzteres wird dann mit europäischen Vorstellungen von weiß/arischer/christlicher kultureller Überlegenheit in Beziehung gesetzt, wobei davon ausgegangen wird, dass Whiteness für europäische Verhältnisse einer Übersetzung bedarf. In diesem Zusammenhang wird die Kategorie Okzidentalismus als abendländischem Überlegenheitsgefühl gegenüber den orientalischem/islamischen Anderen eingeführt. Dabei wird auf Queer Theory als korrektive Methdologie Bezug genommen, um nicht nur den einen Binarismus (schwarz/weiß) durch einen anderen Binarismus (orientalisch/okzidentalistisch) zu ersetzen, sondern einen mehrdimensionalen flexiblen Zugang zu Mehrfachdiskriminierungen und Privilegien zu erarbeiten
In der Mangel der Widerblicke
Get PDFMassa and Minah is a photographic series and work in progress of Zanele Muholi, a South-African activist and artist. It forms part of her visual activism, which fights homophobic violence against black lesbians in Post-Apartheid South-Africa. Focusing on the exhibition situation at the Documenta 13 and on a reaction caused by the screening of the documentary Difficult love at the Pink Apple Festival, In der Mangel der Widerblicke points out the questionability and the challenges of mediations of the work of Zanele Muholi in European contexts due to their socio-political objectives. Based on an irritation provoked by Massa and Minah the text approaches the political potential of the photographs in relation to the objectives motivating the work. The text mainly focuses on racialized and gendered implications. It critically reads the photographs, analyses the intersectional projections in the white gaze and eventually considers the framing of the text itself.Massa and Minah ist eine fotografische Serie und Work in Progress der südafrikanischen Künstlerin Zanele Muholi und Teil ihres visuellen Aktivismus gegen homophobe Gewalt, der schwarze Lesben im Post-Apartheid Südafrika ausgesetzt sind. Mit Blick auf die Ausstellungssituation der Documenta 13 und die Reaktion auf ein Screening der viel gezeigten Dokumentation Difficult love zeigt In der Mangel der Widerblicke eine Problematik auf, die Vermittlungsformen in weißen, eurozentrischen Räumen wegen der explizit gesellschaftspolitischen Ziele der Arbeiten Muholi’s herausfordert. Ausgehend von einer von Massa and Minah ausgelösten Irritation analysiert der Text durch eine kritische Lektüre der Bilder intersektionale Projektionen im weißen Blick. Dabei stellt er Massa and Minah als visuelle Kritikerin desselben heraus in Bezug auf die Ziele, die die Arbeit motivieren. Den Schwerpunkt legt der Text auf vergeschlechtlichte und rassifizierte Implikationen und nimmt schließlich seine Rahmung selbst in den Blick.
In den Ruinen der Repräsentation? Affekt, Agencement und das Okkurente
Get PDFIn the Ruins of Representation? Affect, 'Agencement' and the Occurent The article examines the concept of affect from the perspective of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Massumi. It defines affect in strict opposition to “feeling” and “emotion” as a prepersonal rather than as a-social phenomenon circulating among (human and non-human) bodies and creating “agencies” (dynamic heterogeneous connections or assemblages). Affect and desire are understood as productive forces delineating lines of flight in infinitesimal movements of affecting and being affected that undermine establishing representation “from within” and give birth to the emergence of potential transformations. The article focuses on what theories of affect offer a conception of “aesthetic politics” (Massumi 2010) within the field of interactive art in an age of biopolitical capitalism. It also highlights the possible connections with a critique of representation
Kriegsfilm-Bilder und neue Formen der Kriegspropaganda
Get PDFWar-film Images and New Forms of War PropagandaAffective responses to images are political effects. Thus, a critical analysis of images and their representational function must necessarily precede any understanding of the mental states that images (can) elicit. From this perspective, affects are reactive. They become a productive and potentially subversive power when recognized as interpretations of what images let us see and how images are seen. What then comes into view is not only the fundamentally mediated character of affects, but also the extent to which a critique of images is required to make affects understandable as acts of judgment. Through a critical analysis of of selected scenes from several more recent (anti-) war movies, this paper shows how these movies offer interpretations of reality that rely heavily on the political efficacy of affects. Presenting an adaptation of war to the formats and conventions of a medium, then, need not be an act of cynicism; rather, it suggests that the reality we see through the prism of the medium is real as well, exhibiting itself as the meaning-generating action of a perceived outside world. That is why filmed scenes of torture are movie plot elements that can convey information about the social acceptance or condemnation of torture. Such political messages, moreover, are addressed to a sentient gaze. But if affects are interpretive effects, there is no inextricable link between image and affect. In fact, the latter may be the opposite of that being evoked
Ausst.Kat. African Photography from the Walther Collection. Garb, Tamar (Hg.), Göttingen, Steidl, 2013
No full textWeaving the space we still call home
Get PDFThis text, articulated as an imaginary exhibition, aims to explore zones of intersection between the use of textile materials and the questioning of symbolic and material constructions of ‚home‘ and ‚belonging‘ in the work of a series of contemporary artists from different geographical and cultural locations. While discussing gender-specific connotations ‚sticking‘ to textiles, it will look at what happens when these materials are created or appropriated by both female and male artists, in order to explore the complex making and unmaking of ‚home‘ as a place of safety, intimacy and memory in an increasingly, and asymmetrically, ‚global‘ world.
The textile artworks discussed here – whose feminist genealogies are envisioned as non-exclusive – are loaded with local values and global implications, while they are also imagined as an intimate means to look at ‚home‘ – as house, affective community or national identity – from afar, either temporally, spatially or critically