CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Ferrari, Danyel Michel |
|---|---|
| Title | Visibilizing vulnerabilities the temporality of ???awareness raising??? memorials and the making of the always-already lost |
| Summary | This thesis takes as its focus three artworks produced in Europe between the summer of 2015 and the Spring of 2016 that all intend to respond to, and raise awareness of, the crisis of forced migration and the deaths which have occurred therein: “Chinese dissident artist,” (“Artist Ai Weiwei Poses as Aylan Kurdi” 2016) Ai Weiwei’s re-enactment of the image of drowned Syrian Kurdish toddler, on the Greek coast, (Feb. 2016) and his subsequent installation of 14000 orange life jackets, on the columned façade of the Konzerthaus in Berlin, (Feb. 2016) produced in connection with the Cinema for Peace fundraising Gala (Feb. 15, 2016) and British artist Jason deCaires Taylor ‘s The Raft of the Lampedusa (Feb. 2016), an underwater figurative sculpture installation off the coast of Spain, depicting Libyan refugees in a raft wand walking along the ocean floor. While not all of these artworks have embraced the description, I argue that all three are projects of memorialization and assert that as highly visible international projects they function, at once, as artworks, humanitarian projects, and memorials. I situate my interdisciplinary analysis at an the intersection of literature on feminist scholarship humanitarian visualities, on nationalism, and cultural studies of memorials in nationalism. I ground this investigation in a theoretical framework of visuality and the politics of aesthetics, as addressed by Jacques Rancière, and discourses of biopolitcs as originated by Michel Foucault and addressed by Giorgio Agamben and Elizabeth Povinelli, and in tension with Judith Butler’s recent work on mourning and grievability. I argue that as internationally visible artworks that memorialize an ongoing condition of precarity, in “real-time”, these projects, in their particular materialities, visualities and temporal constructions, produce specific and often troubling political effects, in opposition with their stated intentions. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley Zaun |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/ferrari_danyel.pdf |
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