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Tales from a Golden Age: Dissensus and Exclusion in Europe’s Moving Image examines the interface between art practice and political practice in a range of examples drawn from contemporary Europe’s visual culture. Drawing on the theoretical framework posited by Jacques Rancière, the thesis focuses on artistic interventions in the political landscape of contemporary Europe in order to argue that political effects can arise in the space of aesthetics. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Eastern Bloc communism many political leaders and media pundits proclaimed the world was becoming a globalised, borderless, unified, inclusive, post-political and post-ideological place. Although many walls were removed in the post-1989 era, new ones emerged, both material and ideological, that exclude those who do not fit into and have no part in the shared common of the community. Rancière describes the police order as a system of borders, an implicit set of general laws that allocates particular roles in society – who is included and excluded, who can take part, and where and when they can speak in the community. According to Rancière, what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ determines what is visible and audible at any given time; the act of dissensus then disrupts this order, modifying its coordinates by, for example, giving voice the inaudible. This thesis embraces dissensus as a non-normative concept and demonstrates a variety of its manifestations in aesthetic practices that seek to make visible and audible the exclusions that still haunt post- 1989 Europe as a result of its repressed past. The notion dissensus thus provides the primary theoretical framing of the thesis; however, other key concepts are utilised to explore and understand how different artists, artworks and events exemplify this idea. For instance, Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualisation of witnessing is mobilised in relation to the 2nd Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Slavoj Žižek’s ideas regarding overidentification frame the discussion of Slovenian music group Laibach’s critique of past and current dominant ideologies, and Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of adikia (disjointure, dislocation, injustice) and dike (jointure, ordering, justice) are used to discuss German director Christoph Schlingensief’s radical deradicalisation of a group a neo-Nazis though his staging of Hamlet, while the notion of bare life is used as a springboard to examine Polish artist Artur Żmijewski’s Game of Tag which blurs the boundaries between staged performance and collective psychotherapy in order to work through repressed traumas. The works examined in this thesis critically engage with the moving image of Europe, but more importantly, through the practice of dissensus, they try to re-imagine it. |
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