Abstract
This paper explores how feminist performance photography articulates trauma, memory, and fragmented time in the post-COVID-19 era. As a female photographer navigating the pandemic in China and abroad, I use my body as both subject and medium to engage with affective ruptures of isolation and loss. Using art-based research, I visualize “ghosted memory”—experiences that resist archiving yet remain emotionally present. The body becomes a site of resistance and reconstruction. My framework draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, viewing the body as a “structure of possible actions,” and Radstone’s feminist critique of trauma and time. Through gestures like curling and stillness, the female body articulates the unspeakable. I examine works by Hannah Wilke and Gillian Wearing: Wilke reclaims the female body as a self-representational field; Wearing’s use of masks highlights identity as performance. Together, they inform a practice that reveals how women artists process psychic and spatial ruptures through embodied image-making.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2026 Special Focus—The Image as Advocate: Shaping Cultural Conversations
KEYWORDS
Female,Feminist，Photography，Memory，Trauma，Performance photography
