Changing Body and Society: A speculative examination of portraiture in Choucair’s non-representational corpus

Abstract

What ways do portraits relate people to aesthetic practices and social configurations when representational and individualizing assumptions that ensue from figurative art cannot be assumed? If social being is not given, an art act might be seen to affect primarily an artist’s relation to the possibility of subjectivity. The idea that the audience of an artwork includes the artist herself raises questions about her self-understanding and social being. Building on my ethnographic research, I conduct a speculative examination of portraiture in relation to the career of Saloua Raouda Choucair towards founding a local art history. To conduct my review, I borrow tools from contemporary art, anachronistically, to demonstrate that we may learn ways of studying from art itself. Tending to the mundane, minute, intermeshed matters of childhood education, daily life, and encounters with audiences, I speculate that Choucair’s abstract sculptures offer “portraits” of becoming, germinations for beings to come.