Re-presenting invisibility

Ghostly aesthetics in Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil and The Named and the Unnamed

Bibliographic Data

ID18965166
AuthorsMaggie Tate (corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume30
Issue1
Pages20-31
Publication date2015-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueVisual Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1472-586X • E-ISSN: 1472-5878
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1472586x.2015.996388
OpenAlexW2060048240
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

Between 1980 and 2002, more than 65 women were disappeared from the Downtown East Side area of Vancouver, British Columbia. As the poorest neighbourhood in Canada, this inner city space has been conceptualised within Vancouver as an unproductive space. A majority of the women who were disappeared were First Nations women and thus were historically marginalised from the imaginary of Canadian citizenship. Because some were also sex workers and drug addicts, their disappearances garnered little attention from the police or from official media outlets. They had already disappeared from the respectable Canadian social body by being situated in this area. This article analyses documentation of a street performance by a First Nations artist named Rebecca Belmore, who was haunted by the disappearance of these women and by their invisibility as bodies that mattered. In relation to the history of colonialism in Canada, it is significant that the performance is both embodied by the artist and situated within Downtown East Side Vancouver. This article considers the problems of representing social marginality and suggests that Belmore's performance rethinks representation and points to possibilities for transformational aesthetics

Aesthetics · Art · Invisibility · Optics · Physics · Sociology · Theology · Vigil · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy

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