Casting shadows in mud, myth and memory
Dr. Róisín O’Gorman Drama & Theatre Studies, University College Cork.
This presentation will look at work by William Kentridge, Dorothy Cross, and Ana Mendieta to understand how they provoke awareness of seeing as a relentless activity, constantly shaped by the (often) invisible forces of technology, history and affect. In examples such as Kentridge’s Black Box (2005), Cross’s Medusae (2003) and Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1970s-80s) they puncture habits of perception as they play with the processes, technologies and mythologies of seeing. Working with the aesthetics and languages of shadows they flip the dominant modes of a culture still caught in the thrall of the Enlightenment and its positivist politics. The camera and the eye often function to elide the failures of perception, offering glossy truths and impenetrable images of perfection. Kentridge, Cross, and Mendieta instead use the failures within seeing to expose the dark fissures in perception and the destructive consequences of that elision.
