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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design
Joy As Contestation: Frida Kahlo, "The Dream", Silvia Márquez Pease
Joy As Contestation: Frida Kahlo, "The Dream", Silvia Márquez Pease
Department of Art and Art History
This essay analyzes the pictorial representation of Frida Khalo’s “The Dream,” to unfold the nature and reflect upon the notions of joy and innocence as forms of a subtle contestation. How are they represented? By examining the visible and the non-visible as conditions of critical possibility for joy, innocence and contestation, we can reevaluate the interrelation between the notions of life and death in the Mexican culture, and Frida’s personal history. I argue that innocent joy is a quality that articulates a subtle contestation or clandestine activity of freedom
Hema Upadhyay: Disrupting The Hegemony Of The Slums, A Negative Social Spiral., Silvia Márquez Pease
Hema Upadhyay: Disrupting The Hegemony Of The Slums, A Negative Social Spiral., Silvia Márquez Pease
Department of Art and Art History
This essay presents the theoretical framework that informs my reflections on the hegemony of the slums’ poverty and human conditions, and whether art can disrupt the hegemony and also become a conduit to question our Being, hence Dasein, as per Martin Heidegger. The following pages investigate the work of Hema Upadhyay, in India, and specially, her inspiring protest work offering insights on India’s overpopulation in urban areas such as, Dharavi. She depicts slums becoming a continuum circle of human misery and wealth, politically called a negative social spiral. I argue that the slums, not only destroy the harmony and promise …
The Unpresentable And The Aesthetics Of The Sublime In The Art Of Alfredo Jaar, Silvia Márquez Pease
The Unpresentable And The Aesthetics Of The Sublime In The Art Of Alfredo Jaar, Silvia Márquez Pease
Department of Art and Art History
I argue that in Postmodernism, as per Lyotard’s writings, art “…caters to the impossibility for an attainable wholeness or sense of presence” (1131). And yet, this state of ‘unattainable wholeness’, does not deny to postmodern art the role of the experience that can carry emancipatory power. Yet, it may not be a ‘unity of experience’ as per Habermas, but still constitute a space of experience and presentations of the unpresentable that is predicated by difference. I propose that Lyotard’s theory of the presentation of the unpresentable, which sees presentation of artworks oriented towards formless art language games and communication, are …