‘Beyond the sovereign self’: A dialogical review of Coloured by W eather by Orla Whelan

Abstract

In a chapter titled ‘our pernicious temporality’ from his Beyond the Sovereign Self (2024), Grant Kester explores the transformative potential of socially-engaged art. Kester's argument is that a dialogical understanding of aesthetic experience can help us to rethink the normativity of aesthetic autonomy, along with the subject of that discursive apparatus – the ‘sovereign self’. In this review, sociologist Kevin Ryan and curator Neal Harlow put Kester's thesis to the test of practice through a dialogical encounter with a body of work by artist Orla Whelan, recently exhibited in Ireland under the title Coloured by Weather. Drawing on insights on temporality and aesthesis from the fields of Black feminist theory and decolonial theory, Ryan and Harlow explore the ‘our’ invoked by Kester, which they understand to be the temporality of Western modernity.

Keywords

Aesthesis temporality fugitivity engaged-art

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