Description
The term ‘identity’ implies a visibility and recognition formed through a position in which someone can be identified. However, under what conditions might ‘invisibility’ be an identity strategy; disappearance rather than appearance? The figurative representation of a radically different conception of ‘self’ was of profound concern to modernist avant-garde artists. In contrast to established representational conventions, new visual forms of articulating the subject were produced that instead reimagined it as a temporal, fluxive being – one continuous with its environment. Yet, whilst modernist artists were rethinking – and re-presenting – classical figuration, its experiments with object, space and identity were instrumentalised by the military. For example, cubism was harnessed as a strategy for camouflage. Indeed, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been characterised by the technological development of increasingly sophisticated strategies to ‘unconceal’ (referring to Martin Heidegger’s notion) identity.| Period | 8 Dec 2017 |
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| Held at | Solent University, United Kingdom |