Making Memories
Then and Now: Women Artists in Kerala
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Babitha Justin
In Kerala, an Indian State in the extreme south of India, women had been subjects of artistic imagination, as elsewhere from times immemorial. But the documentation of the active role of women participating as meaning makers in visual history and cultures happened only in the 1970s and 1980s. The role of women visual artists was marginal during the 80s and remained so for 40 years, until the Pandemic time that built women’s art support groups and organisations, which empowered each other creatively by bolstering their extensive journeys as women artists. These artistic communities gained visibility after 2020 with their artwork that conveyed “an undivided feminine sense of nature, culture, and history. Some of them boldly critiqued the polarised ideals of patriarchy.” The paper analyses the works of contemporary women artists of Kerala, their struggle to attain visibility and their current status, where their solidarity and struggles have created a visually empowering space amidst patriarchal values.
Unintended Artistic Consequences of Graffiti Removal in Urban Landscape: The City as an Reluctant Image-Maker View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Burcu Kayhan, Eylül Deniz Akkuzu
This paper explores how graffiti removal practices—often seen as mundane concealing tasks—can produce visually compelling outcomes that are reminiscent of what they attempt to erase. These unintended visual outcomes, marked by awkward color patches, rough textures, or transparent traces, challenge the boundary between erasure and expression. Hereby, they raise critical questions about authorship, intention, and the role of the viewer that are from long-standing debates within visual culture and art theory particularly throughout the 20th century. Focusing on examples of removals in Istanbul, the study employs a form-based visual analysis to classify different types of graffiti removal across the city. This classification is not merely descriptive; it also serves as an interpretive framework to understand how these architectural surfaces contribute to the visual narrative of the urban landscape, eventually transforming into what may be called urban tales. The research argues that such removal acts, despite lacking deliberate artistic intention, give rise to a spontaneous visual language that reshapes the city’s collective memory. These surfaces, stuck between the cycle of creation and annihilation, form a self-sustaining urban gallery, where repetition, layering, and erasure construct a living archive of image-based communication. Rather than being the opposite of graffiti, removal becomes its partner in a continuous dialogue; both contributing to how the city is read, remembered, and perceived. Thus, by turning our attention to what remains, this study invites a reconsideration of image-making, urban representation, and narration in contemporary cities.
Fidelity Loss in WikiArt Images of Paintings: Effects on Aesthetic Ratings and Preferences
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lisa Koßmann, Johan Wagemans, Stefanie De Winter
With the emergence of large online datasets, research with digital versions of images is more popular than ever. However, little work has been done to assess the fidelity of these digital reproductions. We identify four types of fidelity loss in the WikiArt dataset and assess their effect on aesthetic judgement and originality assessment in two online studies. Our Fidelity Of Painting Images Dataset (FOPID) contains 750 images spanning 25 art styles, including 250 low-fidelity images sampled from WikiArt (blurred, cropped, enhanced, outdated, or combinations thereof), and two higher-fidelity counterparts, one from a museum website and one from a third-party source (with in-between quality). In Study 1, lay participants (N=298) rated 100 of the 250 images (randomly in one of the three versions) on their aesthetic appreciation (0–100 scale). No significant difference was found between fidelity groups , although images with combined distortions received the lowest mean rating. In Study 2, lay participants (N=108) saw the three variants of each painting side by side, and indicated their preferred image and the image they believed the original. The in-between version was most preferred, but the high-fidelity version was most often identified as the original. Overall, fidelity appears to matter little without context, although different distortions lead to different aesthetic evaluations. When different versions can be compared directly, participants prefer higher-fidelity images, calling into question the generalizability of studies relying on low-fidelity reproductions and underscoring the importance of fidelity awareness in aesthetics research.
