Duplexes

Abstract

The images in this section are the latest addition to Aleksandra Domanović’s exploration of the co-constitutive powers of the gaze that she has been developing for the past two years. Employing the Bezold-effect, an optical illusion that makes a color appear to change depending on its adjacent colors, the works illustrate the fraught distinction between seeing and perceiving, as well as the entangled object/observer relationship in Karen Barad’s account of the ultrasound. In their 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad analyzes the social, material and discursive changes that take place in the technological “seeing” of ultrasonography. There is no unambiguous way, they argue, to differentiate between the object and the agents of observation. Separated from both mother and fetus, the image of the ultrasound becomes the object, and we the viewers the agents of observation.

The series of images and the previous text by Nina Franz are the result of an ongoing exchange between the artist and the author.