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Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination
Starting with an inquiry into what I speculate to be a portrait family photograph from 1941 taken amidst one of Nazi Germany's mass murder operations in Liepāja, Latvia, I encounter a young girl who looks to the ground and hides her face. Due to this visual obfuscation I direct a plea for her to loo...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English English |
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Michaelis School of Fine Art
2026
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| _version_ | 1867614057674047488 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Washkansky, Dale |
| author2 | Campbell, Kurt |
| author_browse | Campbell, Kurt Washkansky, Dale |
| author_facet | Campbell, Kurt Washkansky, Dale |
| author_sort | Washkansky, Dale |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Starting with an inquiry into what I speculate to be a portrait family photograph from 1941 taken amidst one of Nazi Germany's mass murder operations in Liepāja, Latvia, I encounter a young girl who looks to the ground and hides her face. Due to this visual obfuscation I direct a plea for her to look up and meet my gaze. The question as to why this photograph was taken shortly before their execution looms large. My yearning to see the young girl's face and know more, coming to some understanding about the circumstances and the people therein, was the impetus to my artistic response – the work of imagining beyond the frame to explore its hauntingly grievous impact. By deploying certain strategies, art, I argue, can offer a novel means to reposition traumatic historical events outside the determinisms associated with conventional practices of historiography, which quell their disruptive temporality, so that they can enter the ambiguous realm of subjective inquiry, where they remain contingent, indeterminate, and open-ended. In search for strategies, I analyse a selection of artworks by Penny Siopis and Anton Kusters that respectively utilise the mediums of film and photography. I discuss how their artworks challenge conventional representations of historical traumas by rousing the forces of the imagination and affect so that each viewer becomes a participant within the indefinite process of making meaning. Crucial strategies that I identify include: activating the vibrant opacity of materiality, haptics, discontinuous narratives, and the dialectics of montage, all of which emphasise particularity, where the subjective imbricates with the historical, social, and cultural. I argue that these strategies demonstrate how the image is never fully formed or static for observational interpretation, but always relational and orientated towards an anterior future, engendering an encounter with heterogeneous, multidirectional time that problematises and disrupts causal chronological logic. Following which, by applying these strategies within my own artistic practice, I demonstrate how the plea, the original point of obfuscation, is thus transformed by my practice from a desire to see into a highly generative re-discovery of the photograph's affective relationality, thus arguing for art's capabilities to potentialise knowledge from un-knowing. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/42758 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | English eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:45:59.757Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publishDateRange | 2026 |
| publishDateSort | 2026 |
| publisher | Michaelis School of Fine Art |
| publisherStr | Michaelis School of Fine Art |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/42758 Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination Washkansky, Dale Campbell, Kurt Siopis, Penelope fine arts Starting with an inquiry into what I speculate to be a portrait family photograph from 1941 taken amidst one of Nazi Germany's mass murder operations in Liepāja, Latvia, I encounter a young girl who looks to the ground and hides her face. Due to this visual obfuscation I direct a plea for her to look up and meet my gaze. The question as to why this photograph was taken shortly before their execution looms large. My yearning to see the young girl's face and know more, coming to some understanding about the circumstances and the people therein, was the impetus to my artistic response – the work of imagining beyond the frame to explore its hauntingly grievous impact. By deploying certain strategies, art, I argue, can offer a novel means to reposition traumatic historical events outside the determinisms associated with conventional practices of historiography, which quell their disruptive temporality, so that they can enter the ambiguous realm of subjective inquiry, where they remain contingent, indeterminate, and open-ended. In search for strategies, I analyse a selection of artworks by Penny Siopis and Anton Kusters that respectively utilise the mediums of film and photography. I discuss how their artworks challenge conventional representations of historical traumas by rousing the forces of the imagination and affect so that each viewer becomes a participant within the indefinite process of making meaning. Crucial strategies that I identify include: activating the vibrant opacity of materiality, haptics, discontinuous narratives, and the dialectics of montage, all of which emphasise particularity, where the subjective imbricates with the historical, social, and cultural. I argue that these strategies demonstrate how the image is never fully formed or static for observational interpretation, but always relational and orientated towards an anterior future, engendering an encounter with heterogeneous, multidirectional time that problematises and disrupts causal chronological logic. Following which, by applying these strategies within my own artistic practice, I demonstrate how the plea, the original point of obfuscation, is thus transformed by my practice from a desire to see into a highly generative re-discovery of the photograph's affective relationality, thus arguing for art's capabilities to potentialise knowledge from un-knowing. 2026-01-29T13:18:18Z 2026-01-29T13:18:18Z 2025 2026-01-29T13:17:09Z Thesis / Dissertation Doctoral PhD http://hdl.handle.net/11427/42758 en eng application/pdf Michaelis School of Fine Art Faculty of Humanities University of Cape Town |
| spellingShingle | fine arts Washkansky, Dale Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination |
| thesis_degree_str | Doctoral |
| title | Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination |
| title_full | Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination |
| title_fullStr | Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination |
| title_full_unstemmed | Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination |
| title_short | Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination |
| title_sort | re presenting historical trauma art making and the affective imagination |
| topic | fine arts |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/42758 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT washkanskydale representinghistoricaltraumaartmakingandtheaffectiveimagination |