Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination

Washkansky, Dale

Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination

Thesis / Dissertation

2025

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Michaelis School of Fine Art

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

Starting with an inquiry into what I speculate to be a portrait family photograph from 1941 taken amidst one of Nazi Germany's mass murder operations in Liepāja, Latvia, I encounter a young girl who looks to the ground and hides her face. Due to this visual obfuscation I direct a plea for her to look up and meet my gaze. The question as to why this photograph was taken shortly before their execution looms large. My yearning to see the young girl's face and know more, coming to some understanding about the circumstances and the people therein, was the impetus to my artistic response – the work of imagining beyond the frame to explore its hauntingly grievous impact. By deploying certain strategies, art, I argue, can offer a novel means to reposition traumatic historical events outside the determinisms associated with conventional practices of historiography, which quell their disruptive temporality, so that they can enter the ambiguous realm of subjective inquiry, where they remain contingent, indeterminate, and open-ended. In search for strategies, I analyse a selection of artworks by Penny Siopis and Anton Kusters that respectively utilise the mediums of film and photography. I discuss how their artworks challenge conventional representations of historical traumas by rousing the forces of the imagination and affect so that each viewer becomes a participant within the indefinite process of making meaning. Crucial strategies that I identify include: activating the vibrant opacity of materiality, haptics, discontinuous narratives, and the dialectics of montage, all of which emphasise particularity, where the subjective imbricates with the historical, social, and cultural. I argue that these strategies demonstrate how the image is never fully formed or static for observational interpretation, but always relational and orientated towards an anterior future, engendering an encounter with heterogeneous, multidirectional time that problematises and disrupts causal chronological logic. Following which, by applying these strategies within my own artistic practice, I demonstrate how the plea, the original point of obfuscation, is thus transformed by my practice from a desire to see into a highly generative re-discovery of the photograph's affective relationality, thus arguing for art's capabilities to potentialise knowledge from un-knowing.

Keywords

fine arts

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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