A new ‘dance of agency’: an embodied engagement with material agency in artistic practice.
Loading...
Date
2023
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
My current body of work explores, and is rooted in, the issues and challenges surrounding
posthuman performativity as part of the New Materialisms.
These theories claim to offer a new way of making/knowing/being that is not anthropocentric.
From this framework, I approach understandings of material agency that seek to go beyond
human agency and “chasten my fantasies of human mastery”1.
My objective is to investigate my ‘dance of agency’2 through a posthumanist lens, as I engage in
an inter-epistemic dialogue, which seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the
human, the animal, and the inanimate. This dialogue positions itself on the boundaries of many
disciplines, namely physics, biological systems theory, psychology and chemistry, in an attempt
to apply a posthumanist theory to the Visual Arts. Using my art practice and the exhibition, ‘Material Agency in the Anthropocene’, from my
practice-led research, I explore my own, and society's vulnerability in a manner that pays
attention to the powerful ‘being’ of nonhuman forces and materials and their inherent entropic
‘messiness’.
Given the scope and scale of current non-human agencies, such as viral, biological and climate
change factors, I suggest that this area of research into a new 'dance of agency' between the
human and the non-human could be of contemporary value.
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.