'AUTOBIOGRAPHY' - DECEMBER 2008
9 & 10 DECEMBER: SESSION WITH MARTA ZARZYCKA
Examining the concepts of self-portraiture, gesture and roleplaying, Dr. Marta Zarzycka focused on the problem of masquerade in the art of American photographer Cindy Sherman and its implications for feminist art practices.
Reading: Amelia Jones, "'The Eternal Return': Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment”, 2002
Examining the concepts of self-portraiture, gesture and roleplaying, Dr. Marta Zarzycka focused on the problem of masquerade in the art of American photographer Cindy Sherman and its implications for feminist art practices.
Reading: Amelia Jones, "'The Eternal Return': Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment”, 2002
Untitled, 2003, C-print, 26 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.
Dr. Marta Zarzycka, PhD, is a teacher at the Department of Gender Studies, Utrecht University. In her current research, Dr. Zarzycka focuses on the role of digital photography in shaping collective Western consciousness through its representation of trauma happening globally.
Nowadays, the speed with which the digital images of war, starvation, poverty and violence travel around the world is the basis of their intertextuality, a continual borrowing and cross-referencing of meanings between images. The goal of research is to examine how the digital photograph works as an assemblage to the meanings we (re) produce as viewers from our own position of privileged consumers of those images and how our fascination with “post-photographs” (Mitchell, 1992) of trauma might be explained as the crisis of humanist subject that is taking a form in the cult of wounded, diseased and traumatized bodies (Braidotti, 2002).
Nowadays, the speed with which the digital images of war, starvation, poverty and violence travel around the world is the basis of their intertextuality, a continual borrowing and cross-referencing of meanings between images. The goal of research is to examine how the digital photograph works as an assemblage to the meanings we (re) produce as viewers from our own position of privileged consumers of those images and how our fascination with “post-photographs” (Mitchell, 1992) of trauma might be explained as the crisis of humanist subject that is taking a form in the cult of wounded, diseased and traumatized bodies (Braidotti, 2002).
