The project of abstraction (2015-2020) [multi-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3364
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; Camberwell Space, London, England; Thames-Side Studios, London, England; Collyer Bristow Gallery, London, England; and other locations.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2015
- URL
-
https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.c.5096342
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Andrea Medjesi-Jones’s research output takes on a holistic approach. It considers 4 exhibitions and a curatorial project in a period between 2015 -2020 in order to outline and contextualise more specific questions and a method in her painterly practice. The research method is informed by the rigours approach to practice (epistemological and experimental), and it investigates and interprets the relationship between abstraction and ideology in the Post-Yugoslav space. The question posed is – does abstraction lead to totalitarianism? The visual responses to the question are conveyed in a long-standing, practice-base project titled – The project of Abstraction (2016-ongoing). The project is disseminated in a form of group exhibitions and a curatorial project titled ‘The Inhuman- difficult transition’.
The context for this research, and its arguments, are in reference to a political identity of “brotherhood and unity” as a model for multi-ethnic society of the former Yugoslavia, whose historical and geographical backgrounds reside in the history of migration, also political and cultural spectres of Europe in the wake of WW2.
This form of doctrine is embedded within a visual vocabulary of abstraction as a means to unify and universalise the multi-ethnic experiences and the traumas of history.
Its legacy is best exemplified in the monumental, brutalist architecture of the former Yugoslavia. The monuments in question commemorate the struggles and the anti-fascist fight for independence during WW2, and provide an invaluable source of references in articulating abstraction and its relationship to ideology Medjesi-Jones assembles and appropriates to construct her paintings.
This research proposes a new method in painting, one that is archaeological in its conceptual framework, also specific to its geo-political traditions and iconography (or the lack of thereof) that communicates the crisis of representation in both Western and Eastern visual traditions, and commemorates the absence of its unity.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
