My study is a theoretical intervention of the South African contemporary visual art of Mary Sibande. It focuses on the figure of Sophie representing the maid in three series; namely, Sophie-Elsie, Sophie-Merica, and Sophie-Velucia. The study applies Frantz Fanon’s thought to the understanding of the figure of Sophie while emphasising the themes of naming, the human subject, and presence-absence. The theoretical framework of this thesis is a decolonial epistemic theory, which is used as a lens to understand Fanon’s political thoughts. I argue that the themes of naming, human subject, and presenceabsence are inherent in Fanon’s thought. These thematic areas give a better understanding of the existential questions of the figure of Sophie in the antiblack Manichean world. It is important to unpack the figure of Sophie as a Manichean figure who represents the crossing of two different worlds – the white world and the black world, Africa and Europe. The study highlights the importance and relevance of reviving Fanon’s thought concerning decolonial contemporary African art and establishing other tools of interpretation necessary to understand decolonial aestheSis. The thrust of this thesis is to deploy decolonial epistemic theory as a theoretical framework to the Fanonian understanding of the figure of the three Sophies that embody the modern/colonial predicament of the figure of the maid and blackness. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / Ph. D (Art)

The history of video art has tended to be told through a narrow lens, one that understands video as a single, coherent medium, or as defined by a single political project: an opposition to broadcast television. This thesis proposes instead to look at “actually existing video”, a methodology adapted from music scholar Benjamin Piekut that looks at the concrete variety of forms that video took at particular moments and in particular places, and in the hands of particular people. Such an approach does not seek to predetermine what video is, but rather insists on video’s heterogeneity. This thesis applies this methodology by outlining the contours of what I call, following critic Jud Yalkut, “the alternative video network”. This network was an open-ended assemblage of people, instruments, practices and shared ideas that, in the 1960s and early 1970s, embraced video as a means of engaging with the politics of technology. It included the New York-based figures Nam June Paik, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Aldo Tambellini, Juan Downey and the Raindance collective (especially Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny), and a contingent from the West Coast and Canada including the collectives T.R. Uthco, Ant Farm, Image Bank and General Idea. Its ideas and practices were circulated at places like The Kitchen in New York and the Everson Museum in Syracuse (under the guidance of curators James Harithas and David Ross), and in the publications Radical Software (edited by Korot and Gershuny) and FILE (edited by General Idea). Ultimately, I argue that this network, which assembles a variety of different art histories, and social and theoretical concerns, was unified by a shared engagement with the central problem of Cold War US discourse: how to integrate humans with the new electronic technologies that proliferated in the US in the wake of World War Two. The alternative video network analyzed the dominant solutions to this problem, and offered their own alternatives.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished