CUT: Undisciplined Gestures in Enrique Chagoya and Yinka Shonibare

Guest lecture by Leticia Alvarado, Associate Professor, Brown University.

Foundationally animated by a desire to convey, amplify, and harness the political and material impact wrought by minoritarian aesthetics, this talk moves across the shared aesthetic gesture of the cut deployed in the oeuvres of artists from distinct minoritarian formations, Mexican-born long-term resident of San Francisco, artist Enrique Chagoya, and British Nigerian artist, Yinka Shonibare.

Attentive to the dynamics through which their aesthetic gestures are enacted – specifically across signs that mark racial difference in spaces now adept at monetizing, indeed demanding, racial difference as a marketable currency – Alvarado trace their resounding gestures through mindful art historical excavation and wilful genealogical connection that enacts an ideological cut from dominant teleological narratives privileging a European avant-garde that culminates in the contemporary supremacy of Global North cultural production with majoritarian manifestations in academic disciplines, especially art history and anthropology, and its sites of praxis through exhibition.

In their works, dis- and re- membered subjects fill collage and installation visualscapes tense from violent disembowelling cuts or sated from cannibalistic consumption and animate the cannibalistic terror associated with racialized savagery built through the visual grammars of colonization. Mapping an intertwined iconographic art history of the Black Atlantic and colonized Latin American, both artists play with the visual spectre of cannibalism and the shared representational tropes that marked populations as less-than-human and deserving of conquest, offering ludic pedagogies to undiscipline our consumptive practices.

Bio

Leticia is Associate Professor of American Studies at Brown University, and the author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2018).

Her talk, “CUT: Undisciplined Gestures in Enrique Chagoya + Yinka Shonibare,” considers how these artists’ use of the cut confronts colonial representations of racialized bodies. Their engagement with cannibalism provides a starting point for questioning Eurocentric accounts of artistic development and the commodification of racial difference in contemporary art.

Contact information

The talk is open to the public. To help us plan refreshments, we encourage pre-registration by email to vedel@hum.ku.dk.