The artist Carolina Falkholt has during the recent years emerged as one of Sweden's most renowned artists, although she has a long background in graffiti and mural painting. During 2013 and in the beginning of 2014, there has been several media storms around her paintings. In the center of the conflict is both the subject, the female genitalia, and the placement, in the public sphere. This thesis aims to investigate why Carolina Falkholt paints these types of murals, and why people get offended by them. I also study how the media portrays the debate. My study is a discourse analysis of the media discussions around five of Falkholt’s mural paintings. Around the works are two discourses that are in conflict with each other. They are the discourse of Falkholt’s defenders and the discourse of her critics. None of them seem to dominate the other, except locally in some places. Carolina Falkholt’s own way of speaking about her art also forms a separate discourse, as she emphasizes her feminist agenda more than what the defenders do. Critics emphasize the image’s unsuitability in the public environment and defenders emphasize art's aim to generate debate. Carolina Falkholt’s works are public in two ways. Firstly, they are in the public domain, and secondly they generate mass media attention, placing them in the press publicity. We can see in my theory background that women are structurally deprived space both in the physical public sphere and in the media. Carolina Falkholt breaks this pattern, since she deliberately takes up space in both these spheres.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-226280 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Ämting, Alveola |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Konstvetenskapliga institutionen |
| 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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