The world is holistically interwoven, and the results of those connections constantly influence each other. While these influences flow into one another in constant processes, they continuously give rise to new thoughts, ideas, and influences. In order to understand the resulting synergies, it is necessary to observe both historical and ongoing contexts continuously. The long and shared complex histories within humanity are shaping continual encounters between people. The dissertation Visualising the Third Space — Lens-based Inquiries into Cultural Hybridity explores the possibility of partial visual representations of the Third Space after Bhabha. It explores how cultural hybridity arises through interactive encounters between identities, and investigates the translation, as well as the visual evidence through the lens-based medium, of this particular theory into a tangible, lens-based visual language. Although Bhabha describes the Third Space as not a specific moment but rather an ongoing process of transformation, and even refers to it as “unrepresentable in itself” it nonetheless generates an experienceable and visual aftermath resulting from a traceable beforehand. This raises the question of how far the Third Space itself, as the framework that provides the opportunity for cultural hybridity and thus processual exchange and overlap, can be represented through lens-based media, wether fully, fragmentarily, or only indirectly.
Supervisor HfK:
Prof. Dr. Annette Geiger
Co-supervisor HfK:
Prof. Andrea Diefenbach
Supervisor University of Cape Town:
Prof. Dr. Tebogo George Mahashe
Co-supervisor Royal Academy of Art, The Hague:
Prof. Dr. Andrea Stultiens
Visualising the Third Space investigates whether Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space can become fragmentarily perceptible through lens-based artistic practices by focusing on ergon–parergon relations after Derrida and McTighe . It explores how “in-between spaces” can be translated into visual configurations both between and within images, frames, and exhibition spaces.