21st Century Feminist Praxes, Ontologies, and Materialities Conference
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
The identity of US-American performance artist Narcissister remains secret: we do not know much about her, we have never seen her real face. The artist?s main distinctive feature is a mask. In her ongoing project "Narcissister is You" she invites everyone to become the Narcissister character by wearing this mask and sharing it online. Anyone can be Narcissister and Narcissister can be anyone, anytime. In Posthumanism (2013) Rosi Braidotti describes how modern technologies serve to create a nomadic and non-individual, posthuman subject, non-identical with itself and collectively connected with others. In my paper I claim that the artistic figuration Narcissister can be seen as ?a precursor to the posthuman? (Toffoletti 2007) and her work as a feminist approach to the posthuman and post-subjectivist (body). Narcissister?s art becomes a linkage of symbolic and discursive components with new-materialistic ones. The body, the internet and the mask function as interacting collaborators and tools to traverse dualisms that still structure modernist feminist thinking. Narcissister becomes Braidotti?s utopia: with cultural objects she challenges different dualisms such as matter/signification, nature/artifice, subject/object, individual/collective, man/women and opens up new social ties and communities on a global and digital scale.