THE IMAGINATION OF DISASTER - TOTAL ARTS GALLERY, DUBAI (2011)
Marcelo Guimarães Lima
Julia Townsend
drawings, paintings, prints and installation
from 15 to 30 May, 2011
Total Arts Gallery
P.O. Box: 14847, Dubai, U.A.E.
totalart@courtyard-uae.com
www.courtyard-uae.com
The Imagination of Disaster presents a visual reflection on the experience of catastrophes, cataclysms and disasters in our times: from global to personal.
When Susan Sontag wrote her celebrated essay on the themes of science fiction movies of the Cold War period, the “Imagination of Disaster ” in science fiction expressed the unconscious, and historically unprecedented, fear of atomic conflict. The potential atomic catastrophe added to the proper human anguish of individual mortality, the supplementary horrors of the sudden and total annihilation of the human race.
More than half a century later, the recurring anxieties of a potential point of rupture in human history are recreated in our present context of man made or human assisted disasters: continuous, accumulated, re-dimensioned, added or crated anew, in the various interconnected fields of human endeavors and life processes, from the ecology to the economy, including as well the culture and the arts.
Disaster, observed Sontag, is “one of the oldest subjects of art”. And yet, the imagination of disaster, within its perennial symbolic dimensions, and amid its various forms and diverse elements, large and small, discloses also in its present symbolic expression the historical specificity of the dilemmas, real and imaginary, of our times.
The fantasy of fear, observed Sontag, in science fiction cinema, covered the real fear of the 20th century, and isolated it from its real sources. Going beyond the neutralization of historical anxiety, the artistic imagination of disaster in the early 21st century may have as a task to deconstruct the compulsory image of fear that paralyses the historical consciousness and the historical imagination of the present.
Marcelo Guimarães Lima
Marcelo Guimarães Lima, PhD, MFA, was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He studied Philosophy, the Visual Arts and the History of Art in Brazil and in the United States. He taught, painted, and exhibited in Brazil, in France, in Spain and in the USA. He is the editor of the art newsletter Panoptikon: On Contemporary Visual Culture. He is presently Associate Professor at the Visual Communication Department of the American University in Dubai.(2011)
marcelolimastudio@gmail.com
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