Stéphanie Noach

Stéphanie Noach

Lecturer, Universitat Leiden, Netherlands
Stéphanie

My PhD dissertation, ‘Dark Matters,’ examines the largely unrecognized potentialities of darkness through a close reading of approximately eight contemporary artworks from Latin America and the Caribbean. It departs from the assumption that from the 1960s onwards, artists from this region have increasingly developed visually or symbolically dark artworks that propose to understand darkness as a vitality that in addition to having desires of its own, is capable of acting upon them. By analyzing specific dark-colored or ‘gloomy’ installations, performances, photographs, and prints from diverse Latin American countries, my study disputes the engrained understanding of darkness as evil, barbarous, and uncivilized, and instead recasts it as a disruptive and liberating concept that can generate imageries that counterbalance enlightenment thinking, spawn imaginaries that elude capture, and problematize the association of the color black with racial blackness. This study assumes that darkness remains the ‘dark matter,’ the substance that to a great extent structures and divides the universe into black and white, civilized and barbarian, rational and superstitious, yet has never been directly observed or examined.

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