Visual Studies Commons^™

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Representation Of Settler Colonial Violence In Palestine, A Thesis In Support Of The Multi-Media Exhibition Choreographies Of Resistance, Rehab Nazzal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project-based dissertation emerges from my engagement with theories of representation, settler colonialism, and genocide, as well as involvement with direct engagement through embodied experience of the Palestinian reality in the colonized West Bank during 2015–2017. The artworks and written components of this project seek to represent shards of the multilayered Western-Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine through a focus on the struggle and resilience of the Palestinian people and the endurance of their land. Land seizing as the aim of settler colonialism and the colonised bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance are central to the various …

Settler Colonial Ways Of Seeing: Documentary Governance Of Indigenous Life In Canada And Its Disruption, Danielle Taschereau Mamers

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Settler colonialism in Canada has and continues to dispossess Indigenous nations of their lands and authority. Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing argues that a politics of visibility has been central to these structures of invasion and dispossession. In an effort to transform sovereign Indigenous nations into “Indians”, the state has used techniques of bureaucratic documentation to naturalize the classification of Indigenous bodies as racially inferior and thus subject to a range of violent interventions. This politics of visibility fails to see Indigenous people as people who matter.

Using Indigenous feminist critique, discourse analysis, and aesthetics to analyze federal legislation, …