Leora Farber | University of Johannesburg, South Africa (original) (raw)

Papers by Leora Farber

Skin Aesthetics

Theory, Culture & Society, May 1, 2006

Far from being a neutral point of transition between inner and outer body, skin is inscribed with... more Far from being a neutral point of transition between inner and outer body, skin is inscribed with layers of politicized associations. A primary signifier of racial identity, it is also a visible marker of hybridity and crosscultural/racial mix. It may thus be the site of masquerade when passing for a privileged racial group. Given the historical legacy of skin as determinant of privilege/inferiority within body politics, skin colour forms a fulcrum around which identities are constructed. As such, it has been/is a site upon which racial power is commonly enacted. The skin surface bears traces of racially based punishment: a history of whipping, branding or rubber bullet wounds might be inscribed on the skin as scars or welts. Skin forms a screen on which the body’s ability to heal itself is revealed, while simultaneously registering its inevitable demise. As a site of visible deterioration, skin holds particular currency for westernized women, and (increasingly) men, as this signifies the nemesis of the western ideals of slimness and youth. This article will explore how, particularly for westernized women, skin might be a site onto which dualities such as submission and resistance, excess and control are played out in relation to these ideals. This text will touch on how skin, as a register of the body’s margins, could be considered as a site of cultural, political and personal control, agency and contestation for westernized women. Selected artworks from the exhibition Skin: Surface, Substance and Design (2002) curated by Ellen Lupton at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, New York City, will be referenced in order to explore ways in which contemporary artists have articulated these concerns. Several artists/designers featured in the Skin exhibition propose skin as being akin to an external fabric, which might be crafted in ways that mimic the fabrication of femininity according to the dictates of the heterosexual, white male gaze. For many westernized women, skin becomes akin to an external/internal garment that might be materially (through cosmetic surgery procedures such as liposuction) or metaphorically fashioned, altered, perfected and possibly discarded. Tissueengineered skin, currently intended as a means by which to manufacture living replacement parts for Skin Aesthetics

Dis-location/Re-location: "Aloerosa

Cultural Politics: An International Journal, Nov 1, 2005

ABSTRACT This paper explores ways in which difference is grafted into/onto skin, with reference t... more ABSTRACT This paper explores ways in which difference is grafted into/onto skin, with reference to a selected series of photographic prints. These prints form part of a larger body of artwork and an educational program and research project, titled Dis-location/Re-location. The project ...

Exploring through practice: Connecting global practice-led research approaches with South African production

Representation of displacement in the exhibition Dis-Location/Re-Location

Critical Arts, Mar 4, 2017

Twenty-one years after Hal Foster identified what he terms the "ethnographic turn in contemporary... more Twenty-one years after Hal Foster identified what he terms the "ethnographic turn in contemporary art", it may be argued that art which has similarities with ethnography in its focus on representation of cultural difference and issues of sociopolitical change has become accepted practice in the global art arena. Looking at artists who work within the framework of institutional critique, and considering their practice exclusively within museum spaces, Foster's notion of the "artist-as-ethnographer" centres on representation of the Other and the practice of Othering. According to Foster, the artist-as-ethnographer grapples with the image, the imaginary, and the representation of the cultural and ethnic Other in relation to the white, European "Self". Combining the crisis of representation-the ethics of representing, speaking for, of, to, and with the other-with analysis of institutionally critical artistic practices, Foster questions whether artists can deploy ethnographic methods such as representing cultures and cultural practices other than their own. In this article, Foster's critique of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art is presented by briefly assessing its relevance to discourses on relations between art and ethnography from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. It is then shown how contemporary artists whose practices are located in the intersecting modes of art and ethnography, or what can be termed "ethnographic-aesthetics", work in ways that trouble the Self/Other binary upon which the colonial photographic archive is premised. Specifically, it is examined how, in selected works, South African-based artist Zanele Muholi critically engages with and "refigures" the ethnographic archive in ways that disrupt the well-worn tropes of self and other. Working from the position of "insider" within her own community, Muholi simultaneously replays and resists the ethnographic archive's pictorial tropes, disrupting the authority of the objectified colonial gaze by affirming the agency of those imaged and their positionalities as empowered individuals.

Africanising hybridity? Toward an Afropolitan aesthetic in contemporary South African fashion design

Critical Arts, Mar 1, 2010

Setting out from the assumption that South African fashion designers and their garments are notew... more Setting out from the assumption that South African fashion designers and their garments are noteworthy, yet underexplored, agents of sociorcultural change in postr1994 South Africa, this article will show that despite being untapped, the field of fashion and its propagators is ...

Untying the Ties That Bind Her: Re-Negotiating Personal and Collective Ideologies of Gendered Whiteness in Fin-De-Siècle and Post-Apartheid South Africa

BRILL eBooks, May 8, 2012

Critical Arts, May 4, 2017

Being well-dressed is an axis of meaning for African men.-Kopano Ratele (2012, 113) In their essa... more Being well-dressed is an axis of meaning for African men.-Kopano Ratele (2012, 113) In their essays for this themed edition, contributing writers consider ways in which the sartorial (hereafter referred to using Carol Tulloch's [2010, 274] tripartite structure of "style-fashion-dress") 1 can be used as a means by which identities and subjectivitiesspecifically those of African and African diasporic masculine subjects (hereafter also referred to as "black 2 masculinities" 3)-are performed, imagined, represented, and constructed. The core thematics of the edition are focused on how, through these practices 1 According to Susan Kaiser (2012, 1), "[f]ashion is … about producing clothes and appearances, working through ideas, negotiating subject positions (such as gender, ethnicity, class), and navigating through power positions. It involves mixing, borrowing, belonging, and changing. It is a complex process that entangles multiple perspectives and approaches." "Dress" is a more neutral term, used predominantly for the purposes of historical and cultural comparison in global fashion theory to describe the traditional, symbolic, or functional use of clothing (Kaiser 2012, 7). "Dress style" refers to the actual items of dress and the way they are combined and worn to create identity and difference. Carol Tulloch (2010, 276) considers style as a form of agency "in the construction of self through the assemblage of garments, accessories, and beauty regimes that may, or may not, be 'in fashion' at the time of use". Tulloch (2010, 274) proposes the articulation of style-fashion-dress as a complex system that can be broken down into relations between the parts (individual terms) and the wholes (the system that connects them) (Kaiser 2012, 7). The larger articulation of style-fashion-dress locates style in the context of fashion: a social process in which style narratives are collectively "in flux with time" (Riello and McNeil, as quoted in Kaiser 2012, 7). The term "style-fashion-dress" is used here to denote articulations of Tulloch's tripartite system-a complex of shifting concepts that signifies the multitude of meanings and frameworks that operate within the whole-and-part schema. 2 The term "black" is used with reference to "the Black Atlantic" (Gilroy 1993) and Afro-Asian communities that are descendants of the eastern movement of slaves across the Indian Ocean. 3 With recognition that both terms are culturally, historically, and politically constructed.

Visual Anthropology Review, Mar 1, 2020

In this article, I explore the affective responses that Zanele Muholi's Somnyana Ngonyama series ... more In this article, I explore the affective responses that Zanele Muholi's Somnyana Ngonyama series of photographic (self-)portraits evoke for me as a white, South African woman. In this provocative series, Muholi presents a body of images that form an archive in and of itself, and uses her body as an "archive of personal experience." In so doing, she creates a "new" archival body through the figuration of her own body. This new archival form offers possibilities for the imagination of what a decolonial (an)archive might look like. I suggest that the series' importance as a decolonial (an)archive is strongly connected to what it reveals to me in relation to how I view the work through the lenses of racialized, gendered, and classed power, as a result of my (white) positionality.

A voice of her own : speaking her narrative through pointure -practices

Image & Text : a Journal for Design, 2014

Jacques Derrida's (2009 [1978]:301-315) metaphor of "pointure" forms a leitmotif in... more Jacques Derrida's (2009 [1978]:301-315) metaphor of "pointure" forms a leitmotif in the final narrative series of the Dis-Location/Re-Location exhibition (2007-2008), titled A Room of Her Own (2006-2007). The metaphor of "pointure" itself is doubly-bound: although pointure-practices may be aligned with actions that connote mastery such as "penetrating", "piercing", "pricking", "puncturing" or "rupturing" a surface, their consequences also "point to" restitution: a conjoining of otherwise discreet elements through stitching, lace-making, binding, braiding and weaving type practices historically associated with femininity and domesticity. In A Room of Her Own, conceptions of what I propose to be three pointure-type practices - the Victorian construct of needlework, the historically gendered nineteenth-century psychosomatic disorder of hysteria and the contemporary practice of self-mutilation through cutting - as signifiers of passive, self-negating "femininity" are subverted through redefinition as forms of agency. With reference to the ways in which these pointure-practices are played out in A Room of Her Own, and by aligning these practices with Julia Kristeva's (1995) concept of 'transgressive writing', I suggest that they can be read as empowering forms of preverbal, bodily-driven self-expression; a means of "giving voice" to unspoken traumas and speaking in the face of being silenced by nineteenth-century gendered discourses.

Springer eBooks, 2021

In this chapter, I offer an assemblage of artist's reflections on what could be seen as a set of ... more In this chapter, I offer an assemblage of artist's reflections on what could be seen as a set of unrelated theoretical concerns, artistic practices and processes. In these reflections, I suggest possible readings of my ongoing body of photographic and sculptural work, entitled cultured colonies/colonial cultures (2019-2020; hereafter colonial cultures) through the lens of nineteenth-century female hysteria. The work was made using specific strains of bacteria and fungi as artmaking media in a level two Physical

Hypersampling black masculinities, Jozi style

Image & Text : a Journal for Design, 2015

In this article, I examine emergent performances of fashion(able) and fashion(ed) black masculine... more In this article, I examine emergent performances of fashion(able) and fashion(ed) black masculine identities manifest in work by selected young fashion designers and design collectives currently practicing in the urban environs of Johannesburg. These vibrant, dynamic, youth-orientated forms of cultural practice encompassa range of transnational, transhistorical, transcultural, black masculine identities. I contend that such identities are achieved through use of "hypersampling": theremixing, re-appropriating, reintegrating, fusing, conjoining, interfacing and mashing-up of often disparate elements gleaned from a multiplicity of sources to produce new fashion styles. Many of these practitioners' work can be said to include characteristics of "black dandyism" - appropriations of dandyesque dress and fashionable display as a means of performing black diasporic masculinities. Focusing on the work of two Johannesburg-based design collectives, Khumbula and the Sartists, I show how, through hyper sampling strategies, both look back to the past, consuming, hyper sampling and re-cycling images from Southern and South African history. Both deploy transhistorical and transcultural referents as a means of subversive resistance: a mechanism through which to negotiate, problematise or disrupt prevailing power relations embedded within them, whilst also operating as a form of creative agency through which to express shifting notions of black masculinities in the context of the African metropolis of Johannesburg.

Special issue: archival addresses: photographies, practices, positionalities

This research examines some ways in which~1Olll'cl'~material is int\~preted 1.0~~l~Ufe painting. ... more This research examines some ways in which~1Olll'cl'~material is int\~preted 1.0~~l~Ufe painting. ., These interpretations will be explored from lty,O pd(litions in }Xlinting. For my !,IPutposes, these , , positions will be termed opticality and tactility" I will t'lgue tlun opticf.,lity C(mstit~ltesa privileged approach to painting in Western visual. traditltm. My\general position is ii~accordance with a" l>1X1CiflC feminist view;1.•hich Hnks opticality to CI~n patriarchal values. iwi!l identify and discnss \. y;ulous ways in which tactility in painting may chalIengt,\ tIte primacy of opticality. Ref"'l'l!nCewin be made to~th hist.t'lt'ical and cor,\rum~y painting. Al' .m.x~ussionwill involve the .na.\ing and the~k,ving dt the W"jtK. S~ial attenti~'l will be given to 10Ci'1tingV'alues of op\ti~ality and/or tacti)Z\!:y in sel«:ted stiJl-life pam~jngs by \xmtemporaty South At:~icanartists ..

DIS-LOCATION / RE-LOCATlON: COLONIAL AND POST COLONIAL NARRATIVES OF WHITE DISPLACEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA

In this article, I propose correlations between my ambivalent position as a white, English speaki... more In this article, I propose correlations between my ambivalent position as a white, English speaking, second generation Jewish female living in post apartheid, post-colonial South Africa and debates within South African whiteness studies around what Melissa Steyn (2006) identifies as a post-1994 sense of psychological "dislocation" which certain white South Africans are experiencing. Underpinnings of white identity were and are being challenged through processes of redress; anchors which previously held whiteness in place are, arguably, shifting or have been removed, resulting in a sense of displacement for those "White Africans" who staked much of their identity on their privileged whiteness. In proposing these correlations, reference the artwork of the Dis Location / Re-Location exhibition. The artwork draws analogies between the "immigrant" experiences of two Jewish protagonists the colonial Englishwoman Bertha Marks, who immigrated to South Africa...

Dis-Location/Re-Location: Colonial and Post-Colonial Narratives of White Displacement in South Africa

acrawsa.org.au

This article is an output of Leora Farber's DPhil in Fine Arts in the Department of Visual Arts, ... more This article is an output of Leora Farber's DPhil in Fine Arts in the Department of Visual Arts, University of Pretoria, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Jeanne van Eeden and Prof. Elfriede Dreyer. The contents of the article correlate with Chapter Four of her doctoral dissertation.

Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, 2021