Uncertain Grounds and Absent Figures in Tina’s Keane’s Faded Wallpaper (1988)

Talk description:

For three days in 1987, Tate’s newly opened Clore Gallery was host to the British artist Tina Keane’s Faded Wallpaper, a multi-media piece which combined live performance with film footage and recorded audio. In 1988, Keane produced a twenty-minute film of the same name from these prior performative iterations, which became the lasting exhibited version of the work. Loosely based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Faded Wallpaper traced a woman’s descent into madness to loosen the structures of epistemological stability and the subject itself.

This paper will argue that Faded Wallpaper serves as a productive site through which to approach the various pressures and absences that arise within feminist theory’s attempt to think its own feminist subject. Against the ground of a politics of representation that arose in 1980s visual theory and cultural criticism more broadly, this paper will argue that Faded Wallpaper deals with the limits of the visual, trading in an absent and unrepresentable subject to explore the conditions by which one might come into sight.

Guidelines and helpful tips for joining Zoom webinars

Before the event

• Please download Zoom software in advance.
• Please register to attend the Research Lunch webinar through Eventbrite.
• We will share the link to the Zoom webinar with you in advance by email through Eventbrite.

During the event

• Please ensure that you click ‘join with computer audio’ upon entering the webinar so that you are able to hear the speaker and click ‘start video’ if you wish to also join with video.
• There will be a 'waiting room' feature that allows the host to control when all participants join the meeting.
• You will be automatically muted when you join the webinar and can only communicate verbally if the host unmutes you.
• The talk will last for 20–25 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A where the chair will prompt discussion.
• Use the chat box for questions after the talk.
• Use the virtual hand-raise function if you have a question/comment to make by audio.
• If you are unable to see/hear something or are experiencing technical difficulties, please notify Ella Fleming (Events Manager) or Danielle Convey (Events Assistant) using the chat box function. Alternatively you can email them via [email protected]
• This session will not be recorded.
• Any offensive behaviour will not be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host.