by Artistic Research PhD Candidates of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Supervisor: Jakob Lena Knebl
Figures of reticence as a (bio)political strategy, a forced necessity, and the impossibility of artistic expression.
On the intersection of affect theory, psychoanalysis, disability studies, neuroscience, I research the figures of reticence in relation to the study of visual art, namely photography, video, and installation. Building on the contributions of Groupe μ in structural semantic rhetoric and taking inspiration from Gilles Deleuze in relation to cinematography, my aim is to develop a new approach to visual rhetoric in regard to reticence. This will be based on a selection of my own practice and artistic works that intersect with various discourses, including authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies, politics, biopolitics, and necropolitics.
My research will examine reticence on three levels: as a strategy, as a necessity, and as an impossibility. Reticence as a strategy refers to artistic choices made in response to the threat of political persecution or authoritarian pressure and the indirect ways in which an artistic statement can deflect direct threats. Reticence as a necessity reflects a culture of self-censorship, driven by a perceived or even imaginary threat of a dominant discourse or prestige. The third level, reticence as an impossibility, relates to the inability to express traumatic experiences and memories and is explored as a form of unconscious artistic language.
The research will contain a series of movies, videos, and installations where I explore the revealed and developed methods in practice: a video essay Non-Utterance will be a visual support for the book publication, the experimental video essay Ancestry Breakdown, will explore the nature of the concept of self-identification and identification of the Other by methods of "reverse" visual anthropology; the supportive movie project Post-Iron will question the concept of “expert knowledge”.
Ksenia Yurkova (1984) is an artist, curator, and researcher. Her leading artistic media is text, photography, video, and installation. The main focus of interest is communication and language: the varieties of its substance, the possibility of conversion, mythological aspects, stereotyping (personal and political identification), problems of memory, attitudes, and reliance. Lately, the artist has researched the phenomenon of affect in its autonomous bodily emanation; in personal and political registers. Yurkova has participated in numerous shows and festivals worldwide and has been awarded several stipends. Her works are in public and private collections, mainly in Russia, Germany, France, Finland, and Austria. At present, Yurkova operates AIR InSILo (Austria).