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Ontological Turns Within the Visual Arts: Ontic Violence and the Politics of Anticipation

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Book cover Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference

Part of the book series: Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference ((ATSIAD))

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Abstract

This chapter enters into critical engagement with critics who claim that a stronger focus on alterity and difference lacks the ability to establish kinship relations on a scale that matters in a world in which too many people are experiencing ontological frailty on a limited planet due to heavy anthropogenic impact. Focusing on global contemporary exhibition practices within the visual arts, the chapter argues that these practices are radical relational practices anticipating new ways to recognize and capacitate difference, none of which fits exactly inside the same eternal and universal patterns of social life. Going beyond the trope of representation, the exhibition practices examined in this chapter destabilize incorporated notions of human universality while devouring the western ontological mindset and its archeology.

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Acknowledgments

I have presented part of this chapter once at the Institute strategic project seminar at the Department of Social Anthropology in Bergen, and twice as a whole at the Institute seminar at the Department of Social Anthropology in Trondheim. I thank those who offered comments on those occasions, in particular Signe Howell, Marianne E. Lien, Tord Larsen, Jan Simonsen, and Stein E. Johansen. Some of the ideas for this chapter have also benefited greatly from insights and comments from Aihwa Ong and Charles Briggs while I was serving as a temporary visiting scholar with the Berkeley department of social anthropology. My deepest reverence goes to Bjørn Enge Bertelsen for several, very close, and constructive editorial readings that made my contribution a reality.

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  1. Department of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Martin Thomassen

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  1. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

  2. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Synnøve Bendixsen

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Thomassen, M. (2016). Ontological Turns Within the Visual Arts: Ontic Violence and the Politics of Anticipation. In: Bertelsen, B., Bendixsen, S. (eds) Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference. Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_9

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