Messing with Men in Space : The Speculative Imagination in Contemporary Art

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Embargoed until 2023-05-10
Copyright: Murney, Anastasia
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Abstract
Over the last decade, there has been rising interest in speculative fiction in contemporary art practice. These practices are appearing in a context where the future is being contested through resurgent patriarchal nationalism, ongoing settler-colonialism and the uneven distribution of environmental crisis. This thesis examines a group of artistic practices that use speculative fiction to navigate these spatial and geopolitical complexities: Pussy Riot, Larissa Sansour, Nicoline van Harskamp and Adelita Husni-Bey. Each artist responds to a specific context and builds on a different branch of the speculative, from magic and witchcraft to feminist science fiction and Afrofuturism. The outcome, I argue, is a revitalised anarcha-feminist subjectivity that is critical and creative enough for the present. This is mapped through a suite of speculative figures that straddle fiction and activism—holy fools, witches, healers, terrorists, pirates, and time-travellers, to name a few. Drawing on political, geographical and feminist scholarship to analyse Pussy Riot, Sansour, van Harskamp and Husni-Bey, I locate their work in the fraught space between nationalism and neoliberalism. I argue that these practices reflect a growth of what I call shadow geographies: para-state formations that obfuscate state and corporate actors. They foreground the need for an anarcha-feminism that responds to this changing distribution of power. In contrast to tidy schemas that centralise masculine subjects, the method I develop by analysing these practices privileges mess, misrepresentation and mistranslation. This creates space for alternative subjects that subvert the hegemonic flow of space and time. The original contribution I am making opens a dialogue between anarcha-feminist subjectivities, contemporary art practices and the geographical complexities of the present. Further, I insist on speculative fiction as the motor that animates this subjectivity. Rather than offering escapist or apolitical fantasies, these artists do not eschew struggle or contradiction. In emphasising how their work is anchored in material, geopolitical realities, this contributes to a grounding of speculative fiction. Perhaps there are no clean or clear lines of exit from global capitalism but there is much to be gained from taking the speculative seriously.
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Author(s)
Murney, Anastasia
Supervisor(s)
Cvoro, Uros
Begg, Zanny
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Publication Year
2021
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
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