Stéphanie Noach

Winner Dissertation Prize 2024

Report by the selection committee

Stéphanie Noach’s doctoral dissertation Dark Matters. Recasting Darkness with Contemporary Latin American Art  is a highly original thesis in its subject-matter, and the approaches and methods adopted.

Interpreting six contemporary art-works which are materially dark, the thesis shows arrestingly how artists from Cuba, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, operating under conditions such as forced disappearances, structural racism, military violence, or organized disappearances, created art that went against the grain of colonial, racist, and Western modern associations of darkness with ignorance, inferiority, lack, and the feared. Approaches such as the Caribbean thinker Edouard Glissant’s Tidalectics moor the dissertation in a decolonial and postcolonial frame.

The rich chapters focus on for example artworks by the Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles whose multisensory installation Volátil (Volatile) (1980/1994)  which seems to be composed of total darkness, but later turns out to be interrupted by a small flickering light, is analysed. Particularly original was the analysis of the oeuvre of Belkis Ayón, which brings out how the entire oeuvre emerges out of solely black ink, and in a dense discussion offers insights into how knowledge of religious groups of African origin that, through Cuban colonial and postcolonial history have repeatedly been condemned and otherized, can be better understood by Noach’s discussion, which uses Glissant’s notion of opacity fruitfully. Artworks by Carlos Martiel and René Peña from Cuba, by Maya Watanabe from Peru, and by María Isabel Rueda from Colombia, spanning many genres of art, from installation to performance to horror film, yield innovative insights. The thesis is suggestive, and is also original in that it is explicit that its interpretation works with gaps and opacities.

The dissertation has a cosmic, ecological, sweep encompassing skies to muddy earth, cosmic dark matter to sediments, with an analysis that thus extends to much wider spaces than Latin America or the Caribbean, the latter being the places the artworks in focus originate from. Noach’s thesis is written evocatively, poetically, and with forcefulness, offering a sense of depth in its textures of writing and its analysis of complex contemporary art-works. Many congratulations, Dr Noach!