Piero della franscesca - Madonna della Misericordia (fragment)

Melle Oldeboerrigter

Louise Bourgeois - Sublimation

And suddenly there was a clash of voices

 

 

sublimation (wikipedia)

In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.
Sigmund Freud believed that sublimation was a sign of maturity and civilization, allowing people to function normally in culturally acceptable ways. He defined sublimation as the process of deflecting sexual instincts into acts of higher social valuation, being "an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an "important" part in civilized life".^[1] Wade and Travis present a similar view, stating that sublimation is when displacement "serves a higher cultural or socially useful purpose, as in the creation of art or inventions".^[2]

Marlene Dumas : Sketch for a monument of the peace

Jenny Saville

It’s “a bit annoying” to be described as a “female artist”, she says. “Only when that goes away will women truly be part of the culture.

But I can’t really complain. I’ve had a lot of exposure, I’ve been able to make exactly the work I’ve wanted to make, and haven’t had to make any compromises. A hundred years ago, I wouldn’t be standing here, showing like this. I wouldn’t even have been able to hire my own studio because I couldn’t have had a contract.”

Mary Kelly - Dicere

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Dicere, 2014, on view for the first time at Art Basel, combines, in compressed lint, the satellite transmission of a drone target with a narrative based on the account of two witnesses, Zubair, 13 and Nabila, 9, who testified at a Congressional Hearing on Drone Strikes in Washington on October 29, 2013.
The strike, which killed their grandmother, took place in North Waziristan a year earlier.

Tiffany Chung

http://artradarjournal.com/2015/05/15/vietnams-tiffany-chung-explores-the-effects-of-disasters-in-new-york-exhibition-in-pictures/

Through beautifully detailed drawings of maps on vellum and paper, lightboxes and a multimedia installation comprising photographs, text, video and maps, Chung develops narratives that intertwine the documentary and the archival with the poetic and the utopian.

World history and personal memory are juxtaposed in a reflection of the artist’s long-term research into geographical shifts in countries traumatised by war, human destruction and natural disaster.
Within these contexts, Chung focuses on the growth, decline or disappearance of towns and cities, and explores related issues of urban development, environmental catastrophe and humanitarian crisis. The latter is also the focus of a series of works, part of her “Syrian Project”, that Chung presented in the Arsenale’s Central Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor.

For the artist, the social imaginaries that shape the shifting identities of a place are most effectively represented through assembled fragments that challenge the viewer to discern a didactic narrative. The artworks are outcomes yet also starting points within a larger project of psychogeographical inquiry. They are made legible only to a certain extent without extinguishing the poetic ambiguity of the objects and the environments they create.

Nidhal Chamek