Rina Arya

Abjection and Representation

Abjection and Representation is a theoretical investigation of the concept of abjection as expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1982) and its application in various fields including the visual arts, film and literature. It examines the complexity of the concept and its significance as a cultural category.

Black feminism in the academy

Purpose – This paper aims to be a critical reflection on the authors position as a Black female academic in the academy, and comes from a motivation to raise Black consciousness about the importance of Black feminist scholarship.Design/methodology/approach – The author identifies the unique position of Black feminism, which has had to define itself apart from second‐wave feminism of the 1970s, which marginalised non‐White women and the Civil Rights movement, which marginalised women. The oppression faced by Black feminists is apparent in the shifting platforms of identity that Black feminists occupy in the academy. Another obstacle is the restricted and incomplete picture of feminism in the academy, which sidelines Black feminist writing. One of the ways to raise awareness is to focus on the corpus of Black writing and to re‐position it within academic core curricula, rather than relegating it to specialised courses.Findings – It is found that Black feminism is marginalised in the academy in scholarship ...

Ecstasy and Pain: The ritualistic dimensions of performance practice

In this paper I want to articulate a dialogue between two counteractive narratives: the first is the Christian narrative in which the sacred is experienced in the sacrament and which presents a dichotomy between the spirit and the flesh, favouring the former. The second I will refer to as a ‘post-Christian’ narrative. This locates the spirit in the flesh. A sense of the sacred is experienced through acts of transgression and violation, binding the participants into a collective. In the postmodern age, following the cultural shift in the West signalled by the ‘death of God’, a sense of the religious can be expressed in a variety of different secular practices. The post-Christian narrative accommodates this shift of thinking. It entails a move beyond the institutions of the Church and their concomitant representations and opens up a space to rethink the narrative from outside the traditions and structures of its practice. It is in this space that I situate examples of performance art from Marina Abramović and Hermann Nitsch. Whether the artists in question profess to participating in this post-Christian narrative is perhaps less important than the crucial idea that they are taking part in this rethinking of the theological boundaries of contemporary thought. This meeting, or congregation, of the paradigms of theology and performance art comes out of my own research as a theologian, attempting to partake in a mapping of the interstitial spaces that lie between traditional theology and ‘secular’ religiousness. Throughout my narrative I will discuss three ideas, which are central to the selected examples and are pivoted around the body: the sacred and the profane, the relationship between wounding and healing, and finally the establishment of the communal or the congregational.

Contemplations of the Spiritual in Visual Art

Abstract Many examples of art works are described as spiritual but without fleshing out what this means. This has led to wide applicability of the term but without a sharpening of the concept. I address this by opening up a dialogue between spirituality and the visual arts. I investigate what it means to describe an art work as being spiritual and whether the term ‘spiritual’ can be used in more than one sense in its application. I use examples from different historical periods in art to demonstrate the persistence of the concept of spirituality. The notions of receptivity and context seem to be especially pertinent when thinking about the spiritual - what are the frameworks of interpretation that are required for something to be regarded as spiritual? The paper provides an introduction and overview of the increasing pertinence of the spiritual in a secular age.

Taking Apart the Body

When thinking about abjection in relation to the body it is illuminating to think about the significance of the boundary between two different states. In abjection this boundary becomes problematized through transgression. This article examines the various processes of transgression employed by performance artists that involved piercing, cutting, ingesting and expelling as a way of rupturing personal and social homogeneity and distorting the normal parameters of bodily expression and sensation. These processes often left the artist in a state of stupor or ecstasy at which point they were able to escape beyond their culturally determined body to a state of abjection and anarchy. By subjecting their bodies to a range of often extreme experiences, artists pushed the boundaries of representation and expressed corporeal and psychological states that transgressed social propriety. Abjection became a tool of social critique where marginalized groups could articulate their concerns as a way of empowering their minority status. Viewers in turn experienced sights and participated in actions that challenged their assumptions about art and conveyed a whole new arena of experience.

Remaking the Body: The Cultural Dimensions of Francis Bacon

In 2008 the Tate Gallery hosted a retrospective of Francis Bacon to commemorate his centenary. This occasion was one of the motivations for presenting this reflection on Bacon and his legacy 16 years after his death. The exhibition demonstrated Bacon’s technical ability to capture the nuances of flesh in a remarkably visceral way and consolidated his position as one of the greatest painters of the human body. In this article I want to concentrate on the cultural dimensions of Bacon’s Weltanschauung. I argue that it is not a misrepresentation to discuss Bacon as a social and cultural commentator but rather a way of intensifying his aestheticism.

Religious Musings on Francis Bacon: A Review of the Francis Bacon Retrospective Exhibition at Tate Britain from September 11, 2008–January 4, 2009

Francis Bacon is arguably the most well-known British artist after J.M.W. Turner, and his centenary in 2009 has been well documented in both the art world and the mass media. The BBC archive contains a comprehensive range of interviews and footage of the artist. To commemorate the centenary, the Tate has put together the third retrospective on Bacon (the previous ones were in 1962 and 1985 and were also held at the Tate), which has brought together some of his best works from different periods of his life. This extensive exhibition then moves to the Prado (Madrid) from 3 February–19 April 2009, and on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 18 May–6 August 2009.

Whose history is it anyway? The case of Exhibit B

Abstract In 2014, Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B site-specific installation created a media storm and protests throughout Europe. One such protest was in London, leading to the cancellation of his show at the Barbican. Consternation caused by art work is not a new phenomenon, and indeed one of the enduring purposes of art is to push the boundaries of acceptability and to show sights that are normally kept hidden from the public gaze. From some of the Impressionists’ exhibits to twentieth century art works such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in 1987 and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary 1996, art has caused offence in a variety of ways. This article examines Exhibit B to identify the reasons for its reception. In broad outline, as a white artist his presentation of black oppression was regarded at best as naïve and at worse as culturally inappropriate.

Rethinking Black Art as a Category of Experience

Black art was a widely used category in the late 1970s and 1980s to describe the artwork of British people of South Asian, African or African-Caribbean descent. There are numerous problems associated with the collective labelling of such a group, not least because of the lack of stability as to what the term refers. This article addresses the inherent problems with this category and proffers alternative ways of thinking about Black art in terms that encompass broader identity issues. The concept of diaspora aesthetics, for instance, is presented as a more satisfactory alternative that resists the claim that culture develops along ‘ethnically absolute lines’, to use a phrase by Paul Gilroy, and instead encompasses the lived realities of identity positions as well as the heterogeneity of cultural experience.

‘Maria Lassnig’ and ‘Francis Bacon’: Invisible Rooms at Tate Liverpool

Among the highlights of Tate Liverpool 2016’s calendar were the Francis Bacon and Maria Lassnig shows. They were designed to be contiguous. What struck me by walking from the Lassnig to the Bacon s...