Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

When I started researching this paper, I added words (stay home, stay safe, wash your hands, wear a mask, social distance) to this list as new phrases were added to our lives. In semantic havoc, the connection of these phrases carried a common denominator that would best describe the pandemic and reveal one shared process: that of mourning and grief. This paper presents the intersection of contemporary artistic practice and theory on how fragility and precarity have long been defined when someone is ill and whether this has been the case amidst a global pandemic. As biopolitics penetrated levels of existence, including the body, the psychic, affectivity, and our genes, care has entered a new phase of morality. Isolation has become a new norm, and altered understandings of “care” affected our multiple relations between humans and nonhumans that support life. Care has become a personal burden and 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 crave(d) normality, but how is this possible when one’s ability to mourn all these have been stripped away from a possible space for agency? Through the lens of the morality and care of the dominant discourse of the pandemic, this paper refers to my contemporary art practice that questions the new materialities of the body through art installations that work as biographical narrations of new modalities of grief and mourning.