Visual Culture: Body and Image

The course covers issues related to the human body and its status in modern and contemporary society, with particular regard to the display, representation, exposure, and invisibilisation of the body in different societal, cultural and artistic contexts. The modern and contemporary problematics of the body, and of how it is pictured and imagined, are studied with consideration of their continuities and discontinuities with the visual cultures of pre-modern periods.

The course examines the visual cultures of the body from three perspectives:

1. The connections between visualisation and knowledge, control and power, including the economisation, politicisation and juridification of the body in the context of bioscience, bioeconomy, and biopolitics.
2. The relation between embodiment, individuality and subjectivity, including issues of identity, self-(mis)recognition and performativity in relation to ethnicity and race, gender, age, disability, etc.
3. Theoretical and philosophical understandings of human corporeality and its existential conditions and implications, including the complex relations between visuality and materiality.