The Swedish artist Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942) started her artistic career in the early 1960s with detailed paintings of the insides of early electronic devices. In the early 2010s she turned to the interior of the body in the series Intra where organs and cells are fictionally combined. Here, she used a similar pictorial style as in the electronic paintings. This thesis seeks to analyze the relationships and tensions between body and machine that are found in Wiggen’s works. Questions are posed about the relationship between scientific and artistic imagery, as well as the role that fiction plays in knowledge-producing representation. This thesis looks to Wiggen’s use of the grid and connects it to historical and modernist images by showing its inherited paradoxical relation between rationality and spirituality. Through the anatomical picture, focusing on the Renaissance and Rationalism, this thesis explores the meanings of portraying bodies in cross-section. The role of the opened body has been oscillating between a body filled with spiritual meaning to a divided body, seen as an object for knowledge production. By using Donna Haraway’s figurations of the hybrid and the cyborg, the text proposes to re-think dualistic tensions between the human and the machine, science and fiction, realism and magic in Ulla Wiggen’s works. Through this perspective and post-humanist theory, it becomes clear that these boundaries have always been in flux. Instead of thinking either machines or bodies, the thesis suggests that we see the two series of Ulla Wiggen’s works as hybrid constructions that are both body-machines and machine-bodies.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-34857 |
Date | January 2017 |
Creators | Sandomirskaja, Ekaterina |
Publisher | Södertörns högskola, Konstvetenskap |
Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
Language | Swedish |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
Format | application/pdf |
Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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