Abstract

When I started researching for this article, I compiled a list of words—such as stay home, stay safe, wash your hands, wear a mask, social distance—adding new phrases assorted with the existential crises that dive-bombed us, one after the other, during the pandemic. In this semantic havoc, the connection between these phrases carried a common denominator: mourning and grieving. This article will present the intersection between my contemporary artistic practice and theory on how fragility and precarity have been defined amidst a global pandemic. As biopolitics penetrated our existence—including our body, psyche, affectivity, and genes—caregiving and provision of health services have entered a new phase of morality. Isolation became the new normal of our lives, and altered understandings of “care” affected the multiple relationships between humans and nonhumans. Care developed as a neoliberal consumer ideal to the individual that constitutes the social body, becoming a fixed machine. As we have been asked to get back to work, function, and recover, we craved for normality. How is this possible when our ability to mourn over our losses—with all these existential quandaries tearing our lives apart and eroding ed our agency and freedom as well as our capacity to function as full-fledged humans in society? Through the lens of the dominant discourse of the pandemic, this article will refer to my contemporary art practice which questions the new materialities of the body through art installations that work as biographical narrations of new modalities of grief and mourning.