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Volume 13, Issue 1-2
  • ISSN: 2045-6298
  • E-ISSN: 2045-6301

Abstract

This article takes a closer look at a selection of body-oriented art practices by two artists – Mona Hatoum and Amal Kenawy – to unearth how women artists render female corporeality as a topographical map. Interdisciplinary in nature, these artists’ earlier practices explore corporeality to underscore how their gender, far from being a static phenomenon, is in fact a series of processes that are co-constituted via a multitude of material, sociopolitical or geographical contexts. Drawing upon Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of corporeal feminism, along with her reiterations of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Body without Organs’, I argue that these two artists delineate their own and other women’s bodies as corporeal topographies that encapsulate the fluid carnality or porous surfaces of the female body. Moving beyond representational paradigms that approach female bodies as fixed constructs, this article foregrounds the ontologically fluid and non-representational nature of corporeal feminism to understand how these women conceptualize the female body as an open-ended composition that always remains in ceaseless flux.

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2024-12-31
2025-02-07
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/content/journals/10.1386/miraj_00127_1
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Corporeal topographies: Body-oriented art of Mona Hatoum and Amal Kenawy
Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The 13, 11 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj_00127_1
/content/journals/10.1386/miraj_00127_1
/content/journals/10.1386/miraj_00127_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): contemporary art; corporeality; feminism; new materialisms; performance; video; women artists

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