Abstract
The paper investigates artworks like paintings and sculptures that engage literary works through creating parallel works. It explores the notion of melting boundaries as demonstrated by Dia Azzawi’s poetry livres d’artiste that produce parallel works, or paintings and sculptures inspired by poems. The discussion will center on Azzawi’s 2023 exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, England. Azzawi demonstrates engagement of literary works in larger personal projects of social and political activism, and in that he consolidates contemporary philosophical and political statements about contemporary artists’ role in contesting objectionable political and social trends. My central argument in this study is that various genres like poems, paintings, and sculptures can be better understood as nomadic texts that relate to one another in unpredictable but revealing manners. Their coming together would be an event in which art and literature inspire each other. It uses Jacques Derrida’s and Erin Manning’s writings on imaginative and creative approaches to art criticism to facilitate recognition of several channels thorough which nomadic works connect. Another key argument asserts the need for meaningful and impactful engagement with cultural issues, and the need to draw attention to what contemporary philosophers have termed the “absence of an emergency.” An inquiry into nomadic acts emphasizes the necessity of surrendering to nomadic impulses in investigating aesthetic experiences. It gauges the depth of what Brian Massumi and Manning call the ecology of experience, and to relearn how to follow nomads in their in-between paths and zones.
Presenters
Shakir MustafaStudent, Ph.D., Northeastern University, Boston, USA, Armed Forces Americas, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Creative and Cultural Technologies
KEYWORDS
Image, Narrative, Sculpture, Poetry, Nomad Thought, Philosophy, Artist Book
