Artistic Gestures: Contemporary Art Practices That Decolonize SpaceTimeMatter

This dissertation examines the transformative potential of artmaking practices to decolonize structures of knowledge and oppression. While artists in the United States have engaged with colonization, gender, and racial oppression across different historical periods, contemporary artists such as Ana Mendieta, Kara Walker, Adriana Corral, and Rebecca Belmore critique the enduring systems of oppression that continue to shape current socio-political conditions. How do such artmaking practices challenge the production of the “other” and decolonize pre-established social and political boundaries to cultivate a deeper understanding of responsibility and the world’s interactive becoming? To expose art’s potential as a material-discursive practice that intervenes in power configurations, I argue that rethinking art as a gesture is essential to understanding how it responsibly reimagines and intra-actively reconfigures spacetimematter. Weaving together insights from philosophy, epistemology, ethics, art, and politics illuminates subversive and restorative ways of knowing, thinking, making, and being that emerge in defiance of dominant Western European traditions. A Posthuman Feminist perspective of art as a gesture underscores the entanglement of mind and body in artistic practices that actively reshape materiality and ideas. In a world persistently defined by boundaries, art, viewed as an intra-active gesture, becomes an active force in reshaping our reality and revealing critical areas requiring intervention. This project employs a theoretical-practical approach that emphasizes artistic gestures can serve as material-epistemic interventions, renegotiating the interplay among ethics, knowledge, power, and the material world.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1063/thumbnail.jp

Mar/Apr/May Endpapers

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MSL Quarterly, March 2025

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