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The thesis examines the viewer's position in relation to contemporary moving image installations, particularly the work of the artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila (b. 1959, Finland). It maps out a shift in research from the analysis, occupation and rethinking of subject positions to the mobilisation and inhabitation of encounters, where the positions are in constant becoming. In dialogue with Luce Irigaray's philosophical thought and related theoretical discourse, it traces a shift from the disruption of dualism with strategic mimesis to the critical inhabitation of a space of mediation opened up by resemblance. In terms of methodologies in the field of visual culture this implies a move from the problematics of representation, and from deconstructive and re-signifying practices, to questions of the viewer's and researcher's implication. The argument is structured around two parts, firstly on the Girl as an unmarked figure that unsettles definitions of centred, identity-based subjectivities and their gendered attributes. The figure emerges here not as a representation but as an event, while the focus is drawn from interiority as the core of a subject to surfaces as sites of contacts. This leads to the second part of the argument, on the notion of the address, which initiates a further shift of attention onto the modes by which the works and the characters in them allow and call for the viewer's involvement. The thesis examines these moves with the use of the concepts of staining, haunting, thinking aloud and witnessing, which all emphasise outward and forward orientation. They focus on boundaries as sites of disruption and production of positions of viewing, thinking and speaking, instead of as their markers. Through close reading of Ahtila's works the thesis argues for active viewership that demands constant critical situated ness in terms of affiliations arising from communication.

This thesis investigates the concept of archives and their role as a source for curatorial work practice. It starts with an examination of Jacques Derrida's concept of the archive in order to claim that every reading of the archive alters the archive. It examines the curating of archive material and compares it to a historiographical operation upon the archive itself. Moreover, it describes curating from the archive as a process concomitant with the three main constituents of Paul Ricoeur's historiography: 'The Documentary Phase', 'Explanation/ Understanding' and 'The Historian's Representation', as developed in Memory, History, Forgetting (2004). From the conceptualisation of this tripartite process the thesis proceeds by arguing that the curatorial practice on archives is an expansive gesture that opens their contents to numerous interpretations. The Whitechapel Gallery Archive is introduced as the case study here. More specifically, the thesis analyses archival material pertaining to Pablo Picasso and the painting Guernica, which was exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1939. The series of events to which this archive material refer, have been reactivated through artist Goshka Macuga's 2009 commission The Nature of the Beast at the Whitechapel. The thesis proves that a curator working through archival material permanently alters the constitution of the archive, as well as the subsequent interpretations of its material. Moreover, it is argued that the curator's intervention in the archive should be re-deposited within it as a means for the archive's potential expansion. Through the sustained process of curating archives and the successive rearchivisation of curatorial practices, the thesis presents the case for a powerful, self-reflective instrument of analysis.

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Bolognese artist Odoardo Fialetti (1573 – c.1638) is a fascinating figure upon which curiously little work has been done. Though he is a rarely discussed pupil of Tintoretto, Fialetti’s oeuvre is vast (some 55 known paintings and approximately 450 prints) and incredibly diverse. His work encompasses religious subjects, portraits, books on drawing and sport, maps, and illustration for treatises on city defences, literary texts, and anatomy. His work was influential for several hundred years after his death, not only in Venice and northern Italy, but also in France where his designs were used as decoration on faïence produced at Nevers, and England, where his paintings were much admired at court. Fialetti’s close association with Sir Henry Wotton, and the careful copy of his drawing book made by Alexander Browne in the mid-seventeenth century, attest to his impact on the formation of an Italianate sensibility in the appreciation of the visual arts in Early Modern England. In the realm of science, Fialetti’s influence can be deduced from his drawings of curiously animated cadavers in detailed landscapes to those of future generations of anatomists and illustrators throughout Europe. Because of the diverse associations and projects throughout his career, the study of Fialetti is inherently interdisciplinary, encompassing the history of art, history of science and history of the Venetian book trade, as well as crossing geographical boundaries in linking Venetian art and English tastes of the late renaissance and early baroque. Through examination of his extant oeuvre, as well as discussion of lost work, I aim to recognise Fialetti’s status as an artist responding to contemporary artistic debates (disegno versus colorito), a changing cultural climate and the burgeoning importance of the printed medium.

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