This thesis researches the presumed connection between the theory of semiotics and the work of contemporary text-based artist Nora Turato (1991). More specifically, Turato’s publication pool 5 ...Show moreThis thesis researches the presumed connection between the theory of semiotics and the work of contemporary text-based artist Nora Turato (1991). More specifically, Turato’s publication pool 5 (2022) will be used as a case study to answer the research question: ‘To what extent does Nora Turato’s artists’ book pool 5 integrate text and visual design to create a distinct form of expression within the realm of text-based arts?’. By analyzing Turato’s use of the medium of the artists’ book, situated in text-based arts, this thesis aims to explore the supposed connection between the arts and semiotics, while also situating the work of Turato in a broader contextual sphere. Using the perspectives of visual analysis and semiotics, this thesis aims to extend the understanding of the relationship between authorship, language, and meaning within text-based contemporary art.Show less
Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
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This thesis explores how composting can be a fruitful practice and concept in contemporary art. Current artistic practices resonate with the planetary problems that arise when people tend to feel...Show moreThis thesis explores how composting can be a fruitful practice and concept in contemporary art. Current artistic practices resonate with the planetary problems that arise when people tend to feel disconnected from soil. There is an increasing awareness that soil is not merely dirt but is in fact essential for human and other life forms on Earth; still, the understanding of soil as a resource prevails. Composting is one way to counter soil-exhausting systems, such as industrial agriculture, and work towards a soil-nourishing approach since composting is the transformative decomposition of organic waste into nutrient-rich humus. Composting offers a means of caring for and relating to soil instead of disconnecting from it. Material and speculative facets of composting can be observed in art and enable to expand and review the agricultural practice and understanding of composting. The material and speculative qualities of artworks can urge a reconsideration of human relations with earth, soil and our planet, by making them sensible and imaginable. Therefore, the question that guides this thesis is as follows: how can we humans re-imagine our relationships with earth through material and speculative forms of composting in contemporary art? Composting entails a web of interdependent relations between humans and many non-human actors, such as microorganisms and the environment. In her book Staying with the Trouble (2016), the feminist biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway engages with this idea of composting in a metaphorical way to imagine the world as one big compost pile. Hence, it is in this composting world that humans must learn other ways to be part of planet Earth’s web of relations. The material aspects of composting in art are examined primarily on the basis of the exhibition M for Membrane (2020) by the artist TJ Shin at the Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center in New York City. The speculative possibilities of composting are mainly investigated through the artwork Untilled (2012) by the artist Pierre Huyghe at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. In dialogue with complementary theories, the analyses of contemporary artworks aim to develop ways to replenish Haraway’s concept of composting and substantiate the idea that art can be fertile soil for a flourishing world: art as humus.Show less
An International Studies bachelor thesis on the role of the ‘Ecuador’ mural (1952), by Oswaldo Guayasamín, in representing minorities in twentieth-century Ecuador.
Landscape occupies a prominent place in the history of Chinese painting and lives on in contemporary art, reflecting the changes which China and more generally the world have undergone in the last...Show moreLandscape occupies a prominent place in the history of Chinese painting and lives on in contemporary art, reflecting the changes which China and more generally the world have undergone in the last few decades. On the wake of their ancestors, contemporary artists still turn to the subject of landscape to express themselves, although this style seems now freed from the stricter boundaries of pre-modern landscape painting. The research has the aim to investigate Chinese contemporary artists’ perception of the changing surroundings through the examination of a selection of artworks that will highlight the role of the landscape as an effective means to convey a wide array of feelings.Show less
Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
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This thesis explores the exhibition-tryptic Crisis of History held at the gallery space Framer Framed in Amsterdam in 2014-2015. It investigates how its practices can be regarded as innovative in...Show moreThis thesis explores the exhibition-tryptic Crisis of History held at the gallery space Framer Framed in Amsterdam in 2014-2015. It investigates how its practices can be regarded as innovative in shaping discourses on contemporary art. The exhibition looks critically at how ‘non-Western’ art has been dealt with in exhibition practices as well as in academic discourses and aims to present alternative visions. I have used the notions minor curating by Cotter and histoire croisée by Werner and Zimmermann, as well as Keshmirshekan’s critical history of contemporary art of Iran to conceptualise the exhibition practices of Crisis of History’s curators Robert Kluijver and Elham Puriyamehr. I have particularly zoomed-in on part #3 of the triptych as the layering of perspectives is most clearly visible here. The exhibition practices include strategies of self-representation, intellectual artistic positioning and open-endedness due to the equal importance of exhibition display and public programming. The use of the artworks, the offering of multiple and layered voices deployed in the exhibition practice shows how the interaction between theory, curatorial visions and artistic imagining of alternative pasts and futures brings the field of contemporary art forward in articulating visions towards the development of an inclusive art history.Show less
Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
closed access
This project investigates in what ways or senses bioart can potentially bridge the gap between theories about human nature and human dignity, and actual human enhancement. This is done in three...Show moreThis project investigates in what ways or senses bioart can potentially bridge the gap between theories about human nature and human dignity, and actual human enhancement. This is done in three parts. As I move from a discussion of the current biotechnological debate that finds itself at a stalemate, to a more general view on (bio)art and its potential transformative force, I eventually turn to case studies of bioart practice to see whether art can perhaps contribute to an embodied living of biotechnology in our society. Can art contribute valuable insights to the concept of human nature and our biotechnological future, which the theoretical debate cannot, and if so, how? In the final part, part 4, I suggest that bioart’s critical potential is best considered in terms of affecting the academic debate and discourse. In this sense, it can potentially play a role in the tug-of-war that is the biotechnological debate. It functions significantly better in an academic context than it does for The General Public. I conclude that there are three crucial aspects to the potential transformative force of bioart: ambiguity, embodiment and crossing of boundaries. The fourth, demystification, is shown to be not quite successful in practice. This research shows that ambiguity is the most important aspect to the specificity of bioart. It leads me to consider what I call The Complicity Paradox to be the most influential in terms of bioart potentially shifting the biotechnological debate and enacting a transformative force within discussions on biotechnology and its far-reaching consequences. Bioart does this across the different fields of art, science and the humanities. Bioart can simultaneously be complicit in, as well as contest and be critical of biotechnology and its forces by becoming part of the fields that are biotechnology and science itself, potentially changing them from within.Show less
