Encounters in excess
Creators: name: Harbin, Virginia Allison
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: This dissertation investigates video-based installation practices of three nonwestern contemporary women artists working since the 1990s: Indian artist Nalini Malani (b. 1946), Trinidadian-U.K. Roshini Kempadoo (b. 1959), and Pakistani-U.S. artist Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969). While recent scholarship astutely theorizes the immersive and interactive potential of video-based installation works, it has yet to address what this experiential encounter yields within the context of gendered and racial difference. Arguing for the importance of both historical context as well as an analysis of the content of installation works, this dissertation offers a theoretical construct of  strategic excess to describe both the material and metaphorical engagement with gender that is at the basis of each of these artist’s practices. Through this strategic excess these installations confront and challenge the gendered complexity of globalization and concomitant nationalist agendas. In this ethical encounter fostered through an immersive excess, their works also represent a new formal practice that currently exists beyond the margins of art historical discourses.  The very idea of a transnational feminist praxis has yet to be fully delineated in art historical discourse. As such, it exceeds the discourse itself.  Traversing across three distinct cultural contexts and three very different types of installation practices, this dissertation reveals that the enormity of the task of a transnational feminism is not impossible, but rather, is a compelling opportunity for discourse to exceed itself and transform into something new. Focusing on one artist at a time, this dissertation charts three different modes of excess, which, while all fundamentally different, can be united under their shared production of an ethical encounter between the viewer and the work itself.  The immersive installations of these three artists all portray a multiplicity of female protagonists, who, through temporal and geographical leaps in video sequences and animation, fuse historical pasts with contemporary realities in India, Pakistan, Trinidad, and their diasporas. Troubling conceptions of South Asian and Caribbean feminine identity, these artists’ works evade essentializing definitions and stereotypes of race, gender, and nationhood.   Their works materialize a radical agency for the subaltern woman that exceeds not only the historical and ongoing gendered oppression and violence, but also the boundaries between art, literature, and political engagement.    Rather than charting a historiography of these artist’s practices, this dissertation instead engages with their works ontologically, that is, it asks: what exactly do their works evoke? What is a transnational feminist installation practice? Contextualing the mythic and imaginative scope of these installation practices within their sociological and historical conditions, this dissertation engages with a metaphysical query into the power of art.  Ultimately, all three artists discussed in this dissertation engage with an intersectional feminist approach to representation, and through the evolution of their practices into immersive installation formats, this approach is revealed as a powerful tool for producing an ethical encounter with both the subaltern woman as well as with difference more generally conceived. As such, this intersectional feminist approach is important not just for feminist concerns of gender violence, oppression, and inequality, but rather, can be conceived of as a methodological tool that can be utilized in other contexts, other situations, and different concerns.