Dr Tina Kinsella
Head of Research at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Irish PI on 'Feminist Art Making Histories' funded by the AHRC/IRC Collaboration in the Digital Humanities
Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Trinity College Dublin
Fellow at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM), Dublin
Three Main Strands to Current Research Interests:
o Expanding understanding of the relationship between ontology and
aesthetics
o Exploring how art facilitates modes for the passage of “unsymbolised
experience” into symbolisation and language
o Investigating how the affective dimension of artworks may produce
political effects and relational subjectivity
Three Key Areas of Expertise:
o The representation of gender, embodiment and identity in contemporary
art and visual culture
o The intersection of aesthetics, ethics, politics and “affect” in
contemporary artistic practice
o The role/relevance of theory to art practice and art writing
Research Statement
My research is interdisciplinary, drawing on a range of contemporary theory to engage with contemporary artistic practices. Such engagement is undertaken by way of self-directed research as well as sustained collaborative projects with art practitioners such as Aideen Barry, Sarah Browne, Jesse Jones, Alice Maher, Dennis McNulty and the artist/theorist Bracha L. Ettinger. Emphasising two central research questions, I enquire: “what kind of thinking is art practice?” and “what does artistic practice help us to think about?” Probing the performative, affective and dynamic relationship between artistic process, practice, theory and art writing, I mobilise modes of written and verbal response that expand upon descriptive and interpretative analysis of art practice to recuperate what I term the “aesthetic unconscious of the artwork”. Considering art as a “mode of aesthetic thinking” that solicits the viewer beyond any given referential and experiential field anchored in a specific time, space or politics of representation, I explore art writing as “generative feminine mythopoiesis” that is not harnessed to the concerns of canonical art history, but rather can weave new myths from and through art, for our time. My interrogation of the affective and performative dimensions of art has led me to develop two concepts that I entitle the “Affectosphere” and “Affectivism”. The “Affectosphere” addresses the ways in which affects enlivened and activated by our experiential and corporeal encounter with art can produce effects for our political and social imaginaries and realities. “Affectivism” relates to the crossing over between artistic production as a mode of “aesthetic thinking” and activism as “political resistance” activated by affective modes of knowing and experience.
Irish PI on 'Feminist Art Making Histories' funded by the AHRC/IRC Collaboration in the Digital Humanities
Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Trinity College Dublin
Fellow at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM), Dublin
Three Main Strands to Current Research Interests:
o Expanding understanding of the relationship between ontology and
aesthetics
o Exploring how art facilitates modes for the passage of “unsymbolised
experience” into symbolisation and language
o Investigating how the affective dimension of artworks may produce
political effects and relational subjectivity
Three Key Areas of Expertise:
o The representation of gender, embodiment and identity in contemporary
art and visual culture
o The intersection of aesthetics, ethics, politics and “affect” in
contemporary artistic practice
o The role/relevance of theory to art practice and art writing
Research Statement
My research is interdisciplinary, drawing on a range of contemporary theory to engage with contemporary artistic practices. Such engagement is undertaken by way of self-directed research as well as sustained collaborative projects with art practitioners such as Aideen Barry, Sarah Browne, Jesse Jones, Alice Maher, Dennis McNulty and the artist/theorist Bracha L. Ettinger. Emphasising two central research questions, I enquire: “what kind of thinking is art practice?” and “what does artistic practice help us to think about?” Probing the performative, affective and dynamic relationship between artistic process, practice, theory and art writing, I mobilise modes of written and verbal response that expand upon descriptive and interpretative analysis of art practice to recuperate what I term the “aesthetic unconscious of the artwork”. Considering art as a “mode of aesthetic thinking” that solicits the viewer beyond any given referential and experiential field anchored in a specific time, space or politics of representation, I explore art writing as “generative feminine mythopoiesis” that is not harnessed to the concerns of canonical art history, but rather can weave new myths from and through art, for our time. My interrogation of the affective and performative dimensions of art has led me to develop two concepts that I entitle the “Affectosphere” and “Affectivism”. The “Affectosphere” addresses the ways in which affects enlivened and activated by our experiential and corporeal encounter with art can produce effects for our political and social imaginaries and realities. “Affectivism” relates to the crossing over between artistic production as a mode of “aesthetic thinking” and activism as “political resistance” activated by affective modes of knowing and experience.
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ARTICLES PEER-REVIEWED by Dr Tina Kinsella
‘working-through’ of historical injustices. With specific reference to Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones’
participatory performance project, The Touching Contract (2016), we consider how traumatic
affects from Ireland’s past continue to shape the present. Drawing primarily on the work of
Jacques Rancière and Bracha L. Ettinger, we argue that The Touching Contract has the capacity
to transform participants’ relation to legal history in two ways. First, by juxtaposing unspoken
histories of female bodily vulnerability in relation to law with legal form during an encounter
with participatory performance, this art project generates ‘mystery’, producing a productive
‘interval’ (Rancière) between the common sense of legal history and its potential re-calibration.
Second, in its production of a relational ‘affectosphere’ (Kinsella), The Touching Contract provokes
participants’ capacity to engage with that interval, to be genuinely affected by the transmission of
legal history and respond to it in new ways.
BOOK CHAPTERS by Dr Tina Kinsella
Tremble Tremble combines 'Brechtian theater techniques of estrangement with elements drawn from pop music and cinema, the Dublin-based artist Jesse Jones creates films and performances that refer to historical instances of communal culture yet resonate with contemporary life and politics. The publication accompanying the Pavilion of Ireland at the 2017 Venice Biennale borrows its title—Tremble Tremble—from the 1970s Italian “Wages for Housework” campaign, during which women chanted “Tremate tremate, le streghe sono tornate!” (Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!). “Drawing on this movement,” writes the pavilion’s curator, Tessa Giblin, “Jones conflates the memory of the witch hysteria with the oppression of women and their reduction to the status of unpaid domestic laborers. She restores the witch as a feminist archetype, a disrupter who possesses the potential to transform reality.” Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!'
mimic this tendency, situating the photographic medium within a signifying framework of finitude. Psychoanalytic theorist and artist, Bracha L. Ettinger, argues that pre-cognitive subjectivization processes commence during the late stages of pregnancy. This article places
Ettinger’s insights in conversation with the photography of Francesca Woodman to explore a copoietic aesthetics of the pre-birth scene that is offered as a contribution to our understanding of the ontology of the subject and of photography.
KEYWORDS
*Ontology * Maternal Femininity * Birth * Copoiesis * Transubjectivity * Encounter-Event*
Having achieved contemporary iconic status, the artist Frida Kahlo has become a 'modern myth'. Such mythic status is manifest in both recent art historical dialogues and in the use of Kahlo herself as a 'sign' within the popular imagination. In this chapter I will explore these recent discourses from a feminist postcolonial perspective. Specifically, I will investigate the notion of the transcultural encounter, asking: Does the transcultural encounter with Kahlo's work result in an affirmative experience or, rather, does the transcultural encounter create a space of conflict and confusion?
In answer to these questions I will suggest that modern representations of Kahlo as cultural icon have appropriated and misrepresented both her image and her art. This has resulted in a (re)colonisation of Kahlo which has imbued both her image and her art with (re)signified meanings. In an explication of the consequences of this (re)signification I will examine these newly invented connotations, suggesting that they are potentially oppressive discourses. Finally, I will suggest that, in this instance, the transcultural encounter is a manifestation of 'Othering' which simplifies, cannibalises, commodifies and controls the image and art of Kahlo in order for her to perform to the trite expectations of her newfound colonisers.
CATALOGUE ESSAYS by Dr Tina Kinsella
Making work in an era of social and political upheaval, both artists reflect on the multifarious ways in which women’s knowledge and experience have been omitted from history, their laboring bodies obfuscated, their voices silenced, their language refused.
Barry’s performative films gesture inexorably towards the myriad ways in which feminine subjectivity is rendered both uncanny and monstrous, hysterical yet prodigious within a signifying economy that singularly de-valorizes their labor.
In Maher’s prints, sculptures, and giant wall drawing, the female body becomes a site of metamorphosis, a hybrid repository for secret, arcane or un-symbolized knowledge and experience, that can yet re-emerge as some new un-anticipated form of symbolization.
In the works of both artists, the artistic voice is in emergence from the body to evoke a re- corporealized language that persists to invoke a resistance and transformation that is
inevitable.
Taken from catalogue essay by Tina Kinsella “Gaping Mouth’d: On the Politics of the Body in the Work of
Aideen Barry and Alice Maher”
The Publication is punctuated with a Poem by one of Ireland leading poets and literary artists, Doireann ní Ghríofa. "Split/End" was commissioned as both a text sculpted in response to the works of Barry and Maher but also a performative poetry script which was performed and reimagined by Sean Nós Performance Artist Ceara Conway on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition.
This book was published on
the occasion of the exhibition
fair is foul & foul is fair
Aideen Barry & Alice Maher
November 9-December 15
American University Museum
at the Katzen Arts Center
Washington, DC
Published by Solas Nua and
The American University
ISBN: 978-1-7321553-8-1
Designed by: Oonagh Young,
Design HQ, Dublin, Ireland
commissioned by Solas Nua, American University Museum and The Katzen Art Center and with support from the Embassy of Ireland, Emigrant Support Programme.
In The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-François Lyotard proposes that modern art renders " visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible ". 2 An art of our time, Lyotard argues, should not supply reality with preordained representative apparatus that legitimate the grand narratives of modernity. Rather, the art of postmodernity supplants reality through the invention of 'other realities' that provoke " allusions to the conceivable " which cannot be presented for the appeasement of vision. 3 Whilst the disintegration of traditional representational devices heralded by modernism's interminable crises of representation registered this ambivalence surrounding what can be represented and what cannot, at the same time modernist art authorised " certain representations " which blocked, prohibited or invalidated other forms of symbolisation. 4 One might even venture to say that, to the detriment of representation of the signified, modernist art pressured representation to the point of disappearance, thus heralding the exultation of the signifier, which is to say the reign of the Law. 5 As Jacques Lacan ceaselessly reminded us, the phallus is the primary signifier which designates the symbolic surrogate for identification by proxy with the authority of paternal law. 6 The phallus operates as a symbolic construct for 'The name of the father' (le nom du père) which denotes a signifying economy of power that bestows order, confers identity, institutes language and instantiates the subject. In his earlier work, Lacan poses the psychotic as the one who refuses the tyranny of the symbolic phallus, the signifier par excellence. Being in conference with the order of the real, with the body that cannot speak, the psychotic is on the side of the de-signified, the beyond of language, of symbolisation, and in this way she is the possessor of an utterly unsymbolisable knowledge that cannot be issued forth into representation. However, in Seminar XX – Encore, on Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge – Lacan seems to revisit the barrier he installs between the real of the body and the symbolic of thought. He outlines a further zone for those barred from the symbolic who are " not all " within the symbolic order, who have a different relationship to the phallic signifier. 7
ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS by Dr Tina Kinsella
‘working-through’ of historical injustices. With specific reference to Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones’
participatory performance project, The Touching Contract (2016), we consider how traumatic
affects from Ireland’s past continue to shape the present. Drawing primarily on the work of
Jacques Rancière and Bracha L. Ettinger, we argue that The Touching Contract has the capacity
to transform participants’ relation to legal history in two ways. First, by juxtaposing unspoken
histories of female bodily vulnerability in relation to law with legal form during an encounter
with participatory performance, this art project generates ‘mystery’, producing a productive
‘interval’ (Rancière) between the common sense of legal history and its potential re-calibration.
Second, in its production of a relational ‘affectosphere’ (Kinsella), The Touching Contract provokes
participants’ capacity to engage with that interval, to be genuinely affected by the transmission of
legal history and respond to it in new ways.
Tremble Tremble combines 'Brechtian theater techniques of estrangement with elements drawn from pop music and cinema, the Dublin-based artist Jesse Jones creates films and performances that refer to historical instances of communal culture yet resonate with contemporary life and politics. The publication accompanying the Pavilion of Ireland at the 2017 Venice Biennale borrows its title—Tremble Tremble—from the 1970s Italian “Wages for Housework” campaign, during which women chanted “Tremate tremate, le streghe sono tornate!” (Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!). “Drawing on this movement,” writes the pavilion’s curator, Tessa Giblin, “Jones conflates the memory of the witch hysteria with the oppression of women and their reduction to the status of unpaid domestic laborers. She restores the witch as a feminist archetype, a disrupter who possesses the potential to transform reality.” Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!'
mimic this tendency, situating the photographic medium within a signifying framework of finitude. Psychoanalytic theorist and artist, Bracha L. Ettinger, argues that pre-cognitive subjectivization processes commence during the late stages of pregnancy. This article places
Ettinger’s insights in conversation with the photography of Francesca Woodman to explore a copoietic aesthetics of the pre-birth scene that is offered as a contribution to our understanding of the ontology of the subject and of photography.
KEYWORDS
*Ontology * Maternal Femininity * Birth * Copoiesis * Transubjectivity * Encounter-Event*
Having achieved contemporary iconic status, the artist Frida Kahlo has become a 'modern myth'. Such mythic status is manifest in both recent art historical dialogues and in the use of Kahlo herself as a 'sign' within the popular imagination. In this chapter I will explore these recent discourses from a feminist postcolonial perspective. Specifically, I will investigate the notion of the transcultural encounter, asking: Does the transcultural encounter with Kahlo's work result in an affirmative experience or, rather, does the transcultural encounter create a space of conflict and confusion?
In answer to these questions I will suggest that modern representations of Kahlo as cultural icon have appropriated and misrepresented both her image and her art. This has resulted in a (re)colonisation of Kahlo which has imbued both her image and her art with (re)signified meanings. In an explication of the consequences of this (re)signification I will examine these newly invented connotations, suggesting that they are potentially oppressive discourses. Finally, I will suggest that, in this instance, the transcultural encounter is a manifestation of 'Othering' which simplifies, cannibalises, commodifies and controls the image and art of Kahlo in order for her to perform to the trite expectations of her newfound colonisers.
Making work in an era of social and political upheaval, both artists reflect on the multifarious ways in which women’s knowledge and experience have been omitted from history, their laboring bodies obfuscated, their voices silenced, their language refused.
Barry’s performative films gesture inexorably towards the myriad ways in which feminine subjectivity is rendered both uncanny and monstrous, hysterical yet prodigious within a signifying economy that singularly de-valorizes their labor.
In Maher’s prints, sculptures, and giant wall drawing, the female body becomes a site of metamorphosis, a hybrid repository for secret, arcane or un-symbolized knowledge and experience, that can yet re-emerge as some new un-anticipated form of symbolization.
In the works of both artists, the artistic voice is in emergence from the body to evoke a re- corporealized language that persists to invoke a resistance and transformation that is
inevitable.
Taken from catalogue essay by Tina Kinsella “Gaping Mouth’d: On the Politics of the Body in the Work of
Aideen Barry and Alice Maher”
The Publication is punctuated with a Poem by one of Ireland leading poets and literary artists, Doireann ní Ghríofa. "Split/End" was commissioned as both a text sculpted in response to the works of Barry and Maher but also a performative poetry script which was performed and reimagined by Sean Nós Performance Artist Ceara Conway on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition.
This book was published on
the occasion of the exhibition
fair is foul & foul is fair
Aideen Barry & Alice Maher
November 9-December 15
American University Museum
at the Katzen Arts Center
Washington, DC
Published by Solas Nua and
The American University
ISBN: 978-1-7321553-8-1
Designed by: Oonagh Young,
Design HQ, Dublin, Ireland
commissioned by Solas Nua, American University Museum and The Katzen Art Center and with support from the Embassy of Ireland, Emigrant Support Programme.
In The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-François Lyotard proposes that modern art renders " visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible ". 2 An art of our time, Lyotard argues, should not supply reality with preordained representative apparatus that legitimate the grand narratives of modernity. Rather, the art of postmodernity supplants reality through the invention of 'other realities' that provoke " allusions to the conceivable " which cannot be presented for the appeasement of vision. 3 Whilst the disintegration of traditional representational devices heralded by modernism's interminable crises of representation registered this ambivalence surrounding what can be represented and what cannot, at the same time modernist art authorised " certain representations " which blocked, prohibited or invalidated other forms of symbolisation. 4 One might even venture to say that, to the detriment of representation of the signified, modernist art pressured representation to the point of disappearance, thus heralding the exultation of the signifier, which is to say the reign of the Law. 5 As Jacques Lacan ceaselessly reminded us, the phallus is the primary signifier which designates the symbolic surrogate for identification by proxy with the authority of paternal law. 6 The phallus operates as a symbolic construct for 'The name of the father' (le nom du père) which denotes a signifying economy of power that bestows order, confers identity, institutes language and instantiates the subject. In his earlier work, Lacan poses the psychotic as the one who refuses the tyranny of the symbolic phallus, the signifier par excellence. Being in conference with the order of the real, with the body that cannot speak, the psychotic is on the side of the de-signified, the beyond of language, of symbolisation, and in this way she is the possessor of an utterly unsymbolisable knowledge that cannot be issued forth into representation. However, in Seminar XX – Encore, on Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge – Lacan seems to revisit the barrier he installs between the real of the body and the symbolic of thought. He outlines a further zone for those barred from the symbolic who are " not all " within the symbolic order, who have a different relationship to the phallic signifier. 7
In this paper I will survey the radical and syncretic re-deployment of religious iconography in Kahlo’s paintings. I will suggest that her visual iconoclasm, in continuing to inspire future generations of artists, queries and continues to invite important questions with regard to the politics of identity - the identities of subjects of all genders, nationalities, ethnicities, and sexualites - and in inviting such questions contemporary artists can inspire us all to a continual re-invention of ourselves."
In this paper I aim to contribute to such contemporary ethico-aesthetic debate by positing a an alternative, though complementary, lens through which to consider the transformative potential of art. Claiming that the artwork has the power to contest dominant and hegemonic social practices, I will further suggest (i) that the encounter with the artwork is a
site of radical engagement with otherness, (ii) that this encounter with otherness offers the viewing subject a site at which to respond but, crucially, without having to act upon, the
meaning-making of others and that (iii) thus the encounter with the artwork opens into a privileged liberatory, contemplative trans-subjective space in which the subject can imagine and create alternative “meaning-makings”, allowing the viewing subject to re- conceptualise hegemonic social practices and realities.
Drawing primarily on Simone de BeauvoirʼsThe Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) and the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, I will interrogate Michael Hanekeʼs recent film, The White Ribbon
(2009). Through an application of key philosophical concepts — such as temporality, bad faith, disclosure and radical alterity — I will suggest that such concepts offer a potentially
transformative modality by which (i) individual ethical subjectivity can be re-structured (ii) the ethico-aesthetic dynamic can be re-invigorated and (iii) societal realities and practices
can be re-perceived.
'For this broadcast, artists, architects and theorists were invited to contribute recordings that gathered loosely around the theme of the Diorama as a place in which multiple stories or broken retellings can be read as one or in parts; where the sequence of these narratives is dependent on the onlooker.
Contributors to Broken Diorama in order of appearance: Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Tina Kinsella, Katharina Ludwig, Alice Rekab & Alison Ballance, Ishita, Alexa Jean Barrett, Uma Breakdown, Elin Eyborg Lund & Anders Brasch-Willumsen, Susan Conte, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Jenna Collins, Sarah Lederman & Lola Bunting, Tai Shani, Alice Rekab & Stephen Rekab
Content warning: Listeners to the broadcast may wish to be aware that track 3 “Holes, Portals, Wounds and the Traumatised Text - How to get back from here?”, K Ludwig, (playtime 16mins 56secs) contains references to self-harm, rape, abuse and mental and physical illness.'
Listen to the original broadcast from last year here:
https://www.mixcloud.com/quanticaonline/heretics-12-by-diana-policarpo-guest-mix-by-alison-ballance-alice-rekab-171017/
In this blog Dr Tina Kinsella responds to Griselda Pollock’s talk Re-thinking the Twentieth Century with Carol Rama and Modernist Artist-Women : Creative Practice as Dissidence in the Feminist Century. You can listen back to the original talk on our soundcloud channel.
2016 has represented a time of remembrance and reflection in Ireland, with 1916 centenary commemorations taking place in the country’s foremost cultural institutions. In arts organisations like IMMA, The Hugh Lane, Create, and many more besides, these commemorations have taken the form of projects that dissect the evolution of Irish society and social ideology over the past 100 years. Looking further outside of our own nation issues such as mass mobility of people and goods, the digitising of communication and knowledge, migration, climate change and the increasing global economy have all radically changed perceptions of territories, borders and individual identity in relation to one’s nation state. In addition to this, colonial legacies of emigration, displacement and ongoing indigenous struggles create an even more profound crisis of social, cultural and political agency.
Throughout the day diverging propositions on the changing role of the artist and the state will be presented by: Annie Fletcher, Chief Curator, Van Abbemuseum / Mick Wilson, artist, Head of Fine Art, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg / Emily Jacir, artist / Jaki Irvine, artist / Duncan Campbell, artist / Sarah Browne, artist/ Jesse Jones, artist / Tina Kinsella, Lecturer, Critical and Contextual Studies (Fine Art) IADT/ Lisa Godson, Historian of Design and Material Culture, NCAD / Vivian Ziherl, Curator Frontier Imaginaries / Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili, artists duo / Sarah Glennie, Director, IMMA / Barabara Dawson, Director, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane/ Ailbhe Murphy, Director, Create, National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts.
Performances: Sunday 7th of June
Presentation of Papers: Saturday 13th of June
MART Gallery and Studios, Rathmines, Dublin 6
Keynote speaker: Dr.Tina Kinsella
The symposium, Feminism and the Body in Performance: Current Practices aims to bring together theorists and practitioners concerned with issues of the language, politics and practices around women lives and bodies. The event, comprised of papers and performances will provide a forum to frame current issues of concern for feminist practices, arising from performance art. It will address questions such as: what are the urgent issues facing women in Ireland and internationally today? What forms of disruption, agitation and resistance can be deployed to raise awareness and elicit change?
The event will be introduced by Dr. Catherine Lawless (Director of CGWS) and chaired by Dr. Tina Kinsella (CGWS).
Panel of respondents comprises Dr. Mary Condren (CGWS), Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick (Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, School of Art, Design and Printing, Dublin Institute of Technology), Dr. Noreen Giffney (Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London), Dr. Carmen Kuhling (Faculty of Sociology, University of Limerick), Noirin MacNamara (School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Queen’s University, Belfast) and Michael O’Rourke (Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje).