Jacqueline Witkowski |
Jacqueline Witkowski is a Ph.D. candidate and a four-year fellow in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory. She specializes in the intersections between aesthetics and politics as conveyed through the modern and contemporary practices of textile and fibre artwork, and her wider interests include feminist and queer theory, modes of collaboration, and art as activism. Her dissertation, “Disappearing Threads: Textile Practices in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1964-1990,” investigates how artists countered hegemonic governments by reconsidering the role of indigenous populations and histories within their respective countries through the material means and metaphorical capability of textiles.
Witkowski has presented her work at institutions throughout the U.S. and Canada, including the Universities Art Association of Canada and the Midwest Art History Society. In 2015, she published on the history of craft in relationship to digital and tactile warfare in the University of Rochester’s journal, InVisible, and in the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s 2014 MFA exhibition on the history between labour and craft. Her research was generously funded by the Mitacs Globalink Scholarship in 2016, in which she conducted research at the Museu Arte Moderna do Rio de Janiero, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, and Fundación Espigas. |
resistance, identity,
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This paper addresses what I refer to as the marginal doubling enacted within Lygia Pape’s own artistic practice, which on the one hand attempted to antagonize notions of centres and peripheries in a Brazilian art historical discourse; and on the other address Pape’s own marginalized position within an international reception of Brazilian production, often displaced by more recognized artists, such as Lygia Clark or Hélio Oiticica. Through her praxis, the centre/periphery model constantly bridges what poet Oswald de Andrade called an Antropofagia (cannibalism) of ideas from Europe, North and South America, an idea later reiterated in the 1960s. Pape’s connection to Rio de Janeiro showcased the voices and concerns of the community through the imbued metaphorical capability of the textile as both a theoretical concept and a material practice, and I argue how her precise cannibalization of the textile points to an ongoing dissent, even rejection, towards Euro-American frameworks by incorporating a form of resistance imbued in African and indigenous cultural techniques of Brazil. That is, in Pape’s series Tecelares and Ttéias, the textile both critiqued the aesthetic colonialism of modernism and responded to the socio-political shifts that resulted in decreased rights for indigenous populations and the beginnings of a repressive government in Brazil (mirrored in other Latin American countries at this time). Pape’s work, which explored formal relations, pictorial space, weaving (warp and weft) and thread as a metaphor, spoke to the history of colonialism enacted from the arrival of the Portuguese. Her work interrogated the experience of the viewer and how the socio- political environment is often restricted by broader institutional conventions. Pape’s textile production came at a pivotal moment in Brazil’s history as the country was mired in a dictatorial government from 1964-1985 that culled political power through censorship and forced disappearance. Through this practice, Pape renegotiated the conceptions of modernism between Latin America and an international context while simultaneously situating her work as an intervention into marginalized populations previously ignored in Brazil. |