In the raw.

Abstract

In this paper, originally published in the e-flux journal [#93, Sept. 2018], Denise Ferreira da Silva draws what she calls a black, feminist poethics of the work Majmua by the artist Madiha Sikander. Denying the modern tradition of critical discourses, the author proposes, instead of the paradigm of analytical approaches and the subsumption of art under conceptual categories, a confrontation with materials, as they were, in the raw. With this interpretation, Ferreira da Silva aims for a stance capable of expanding the relevance of art beyond the limits of the critical philosophical tradition anchored in Kant, striving to release it from the onto-epistemological pillars which are grounds for modern thought.