Artistic Voice and Institutional Identity

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This paper focuses on artistic voice identity, self-positioning, and institutional frameworks of representation in contemporary art, with particular attention to African and Eastern European contexts.

Through curatorial practice, writing, and field-based research, I examine how identity operates not as representation, but as an ethical and relational process enacted through artistic practice.

Artistic Voice and Institutional Identity: Self-Positioning in Contemporary Shona and Eastern European Art

The Cases of Again Isheanopa Chokuwamba and Marcell Nagy

Abstract

This study examines how artistic identity is constituted at the intersection of personal self-interpretation and institutionally articulated categories within the contemporary art field. It argues that so-called “collective identities” (such as Shona or post socialist) do not function as homogeneous cultural backgrounds, but rather as institutionally mediated interpretive frameworks that pre-structure the legibility of artworks and generate representational expectations. Drawing on Stuart Hall and Homi K. Bhabha, identity is approached here not as origin, but as a process of positioning: it becomes accessible through the operational logic of artworks, while simultaneously resisting institutional closure of meaning. Through two case studies—Again Isheanopa Chokuwamba and Marcell Nagy—the article demonstrates how material choices, formal strategies, and the deliberate maintenance of semantic openness function as sites of resistance against reductive, generalizing identity readings. In Chokuwamba’s practice, this resistance unfolds through the relational–ethical reconfiguration of community; in Nagy’s work, through the suspension of internal control mechanisms and the articulation of fragmented, visionary imagery. The study concludes that artistic autonomy is not achieved through the rejection of identity, but through the sustained openness and unfixability of meaning.

Keywords: identity; self-positioning; institutional discourse; representation; collective identity; community; resistance; postcolonialism; post-socialism; Shona; contemporary painting

Introduction In contemporary art discourse, identity is not a neutral descriptive category. Within global exhibition systems, residency programmes, and application-based institutional languages, identity increasingly functions as an interpretive framework that pre-determines how an artistic practice can be read. National, ethnic, or cultural labels—“African,” “Shona,” “Eastern European,” “post-socialist,” “postcolonial”—are often introduced under the promise of contextualisation, yet they simultaneously produce representational expectations. Artworks are thus rendered legible primarily as carriers of collective narratives rather than as autonomous spaces of thought.

This paper addresses the question of how artistic identity emerges at the intersection of personal self-interpretation and institutionally articulated categories. It argues that artistic identity is not a pre-given content but a process of self-positioning: it becomes accessible through the operational logic of artworks and is continuously shaped through discourse, selective affiliation, and resistance. Institutional categorisation does not merely name artistic practices; it establishes interpretive frameworks to which practices are retroactively aligned, thereby risking the reduction of their polyphonic potential. These dynamics are examined through a comparative analysis of two contemporary artistic practices: Again Isheanopa Chokuwamba (Zimbabwe, Shona cultural background) and Marcell Nagy (Hungary, post-socialist experience). While postcolonial and post-socialist contexts denote distinct historical trajectories, following Gábor Virág, postcolonial readings can productively inform interpretations of post-socialist identity insofar as both are structured by experiences of fragmentation, marginality, and historical rupture. In neither case does identity appear as a stable, central category; rather, it remains subject to continuous re-positioning. The comparison does not seek to negate contextual specificity, but to demonstrate how the artworks themselves withdraw the exclusive interpretive authority of these frameworks. In both practices, visual language does not function as an identity marker but as a set of artistic strategies that resist the interpretive monopoly of national or collective categories.

Identity as Positioning and Interstitial Space

Stuart Hall’s seminal thesis conceptualises cultural identity not as a fixed origin or essential core, but as production: an active, historically situated process that unfolds within the space of representation. Identity, in this sense, is not a reality preceding representation, but a temporally and historically constituted position, shaped through difference, interruption, and narration. It does not simply “appear,” but is continuously formed through memory, loss, desire, and re-telling. Homi K. Bhabha radicalises this framework through his critique of the closure of cultural meaning. For Bhabha, identity is performative: it does not pre-exist representation but comes into being through the act of representation itself, within interstitial or “in-between” spaces where processes of assimilation and differentiation operate simultaneously. The concept of the “Third Space” is not a metaphorical supplement but a structural description of the inherent instability of cultural meaning. Identity remains fragmented, temporally dislocated, and never fully self-identical—always in need of re-positioning. Together, Hall’s and Bhabha’s frameworks offer a critical lens directly applicable to the contemporary art field. When institutional discourse provides “safe” identity categories—national, ethnic, cultural—it does more than contextualise: it assigns speaking positions. This is particularly evident in application-driven institutional languages, where categories function not only descriptively but also evaluatively, determining visibility and legitimacy. Identity categories thus operate as power mechanisms: by stabilising meaning, they limit interpretive multiplicity and constrain the artist’s space of self-positioning. This dynamic can also be understood through Michel Foucault’s concept of power as productive rather than merely repressive. Modern power operates by categorising, normalising, and producing interpretive frameworks. In the contemporary art field, institutionalised identity readings function analogously: by pre-structuring meaning, they regulate what becomes visible and intelligible. This logic resonates structurally with both postcolonial and post-socialist power formations, where domination operates less through overt coercion than through control over interpretation. Power here does not merely subjugate; it produces meaning, determining what counts as authentic, representative, or worthy of interpretation. Within this theoretical framework, identity is not a prerequisite of artistic practice but one of its stakes. The artist does not “represent” a given identity; rather, artworks produce the position from which articulation becomes possible. Self-positioning thus manifests not in thematic statements, but in pictorial operations, material decisions, formal strategies, and the deliberate maintenance of semantic openness.

Postcolonial and Post-Socialist Artistic Identity: Rupture, Loss, Re-Positioning

Postcolonial and post-socialist contexts mark distinct historical experiences, yet both describe conditions in which identity is not self-evident but persistently problematised. In each case, historical ruptures disrupt continuity, rendering identity accessible not as stable origin but as reflexive labour. Within postcolonial readings, artistic identity is frequently framed through the language of authenticity and tradition. References to land, ancestry, spirituality, or ritual practices are often pre-coded with cultural meaning, even when employed critically or conceptually. Such interpretations tend to rely on ethnographic imaginaries, positioning artistic practice as a representation of “culture” and the artist as a bearer of collective identity. In post-socialist Eastern Europe, identity discourse is structured differently, yet operates through comparable mechanisms. Here, art is often interpreted through narratives of historical trauma, national memory, or ideological collapse. Institutional discourse frequently casts the artist in the role of historical narrator, attributing representative function to artistic practice. In such contexts, personal experience or internal visual logic risks becoming illustrative, subordinated to pre-assigned collective narratives. The connection between these contexts is thus not thematic but structural. Both postcolonial and post-socialist identities can be understood as conditions in which selfhood is not a closed state but the result of continuous re-positioning. As Virág argues, the unfixability of identity is not a deficiency or crisis but a strategy of resistance: autonomy is preserved precisely through refusal of definitive categorisation. This framework enables the interpretation of the following case studies—Again Isheanopa Chokuwamba and Marcell Nagy—not as cultural exemplars, but as distinct yet structurally related strategies of resistance. The focus lies on how these practices sustain the openness of identity against institutionally stabilised readings.

Artistic Operations Against Generalising Identity Readings

Again Isheanopa Chokuwamba: Object-Based Micro-Histories and the Relational Reconfiguration of Identity

In Again Isheanopa Chokuwamba’s artistic practice, Shona cultural background does not appear as a declarative identity claim but becomes accessible through personal, object-based micro-histories. The point of departure is not an essentialised cultural identity but a dense accumulation of lived experiences in which familial memory, communal order, and historical rupture intersect. Identity here does not function as explanatory backdrop but as a problematised relation—an open field continuously re-negotiated through the act of painting. Recurring motifs—most notably the chair and the gourd—do not operate as general cultural symbols but as relational nodes through which mechanisms of communal fixation and destabilisation become visible. These objects are not representations of “Shona culture,” but material forms that open questions of belonging, self-positioning, and responsibility, while resisting pre-coded ethnographic readings. In Mupi (The Giver), the composition does not depict a narrative event but organises relations between the self, collective tradition, and communal order. The chair motif raises the question of how communal identity becomes fixed within designated positions, and whether such positions can be inhabited without tradition hardening into normative closure. The chair signifies not entitlement but decision: a confrontation with authority structures mediated through collective tradition.The gourd motif, in parallel, activates the ethical dimension of sustaining and reproducing communal identity. It does not signify possession of tradition but its care—posing the question of how collective heritage can remain a living relation rather than a fixed content. The future appears not as an abstract temporal horizon but as continuity reproduced through everyday practices and relations. Chokuwamba’s practice thus conceptualises identity not as a stable category but as a continually problematised ethical relation. Painting does not aim to represent communal identity, but to render visible its processes of fixation and destabilisation. Identity is not a prerequisite of the works, but their stake: an inquiry into individual responsibility within the reproduction of collective tradition, and into how communal meaning can remain open against institutional stabilisation. His practice withdraws the authority to fix collective identity from both ethnographic and institutional readings. Postcoloniality here functions not as an explanatory label but as a critical horizon that the works refuse to close. Motifs do not appear as ethnographic signs or exotic references, but as pictorial elements whose meanings are not pre-given and cannot be reduced to stable cultural codes. Meaning emerges through the painterly process itself, shifting from image to image as motifs operate within changing relational constellations—thereby suspending the exclusivity of exoticising and ethnographic interpretations. Resistance in Chokuwamba’s work does not take the form of declarative negation, but of a consistent refusal to allow identity to collapse into representative function. Identity is understood as becoming: a self-positioning practice in which collective tradition and lived experience function as mutually transformative layers. Shona identity, in this sense, is not inherited certainty but reflexive labour continuously re-configured at the threshold between personal and collective experience.

Marcell Nagy: Eastern European Identity as Internal Topography, Ritual Image-Making, and the Suspension of the Self

In Marcell Nagy’s painting practice, identity manifests as a visual exploration of the subject’s internal organisation. The stakes are not thematic—identity is not depicted—but methodological: what occurs when the “self” as organising and controlling instance is temporarily suspended in the creative process, allowing surrender rather than self-surveillance to guide image formation. Within this pictorial space, subjectivity does not consolidate but dissolves; the self appears not as stable origin but as a continuously shifting configuration. Accordingly, Nagy’s visual language operates in the interstitial zone between figuration and abstraction. Layered, often translucent paint, fragmentary motifs, coverings and re-paintings function not merely as formal devices but as material traces of identity’s temporality—formation, dissolution, re-organisation. Openness here is not an aesthetic gesture but the pictorial equivalent of the subject’s unfixability: the artwork operates not as closed statement but as process, in which meaning emerges, shifts, and reconfigures through successive decisions, erasures, and returns. Recurring motifs—mask-like and portrait-like faces, multiplied eyes, bodily fragments, vascular, root-like and network structures—do not represent specific individuals but visualise the tension between persona and internal experience. Masking does not conceal but reveals, exposing the permeability between public self and pre-verbal, unconscious imagery. The multiplied eyes articulate not merely multiple viewpoints, but the compulsion of self-observation and internalised surveillance—the control mechanism that persistently re-enters the process even as painting seeks its suspension. Network-like structures function as visual models of permeability, linking bodily and transcendent layers while carrying the internal tension and energetic structure of the images. This pictorial operation aligns directly with the study’s theoretical framework. Hall’s concept of identity as continuously produced and never closed appears in Nagy’s work not as narrative claim but as image-making logic. Subjectivity becomes visible as ongoing transformation: layering, erasure, re-painting, and modified returns of motifs correspond to identity’s continual rewriting. Fragmentation here is not lack but mode of operation—evidence that the subject cannot be reintegrated into a single coherent narrative, whether autobiographical, ideological, or national. Oscillation between figural and abstract, conscious and instinctive, control and surrender unfolds within an interstitial pictorial space where subjectivity does not represent itself but emerges in temporary configurations. Spirituality, the unconscious, and visionary imagery appear not as doctrinal content but as method: painterly procedures enabling the suspension of ideological, normative, and self-identifying reflexes. Eastern European post-socialist experience in Nagy’s work thus articulates itself not iconographically—not through national symbols or historical narratives—but through a structural gesture that reconceives identity as inward labour rather than outward representation. Resistance to institutionally expected national or collective readings manifests not through polemical statements but through the organisation of painting as a space for dissolving ego boundaries, dismantling persona, and opening internal permeability. Nagy’s painting therefore conceptualises subjectivity through open pictorial states that render visible the experience of becoming against the promise of stable identity. Identity emerges here as a process unfolding within the work: a provisional, re-writable configuration resistant to institutional fixation of meaning.

Community as Structural Difference in Shona and Eastern European Self-Positioning

The comparison of the two case studies reveals a difference that is not iconographic or thematic but structural: the distinct function of community in self-positioning. This distinction clarifies how both practices resist institutionally stabilised identity readings while operating within different historical burdens. Shona identity is grounded in a relational ontology in which individual existence is embedded within communal and intergenerational relations. Within the ethical framework of hunhu/ubuntu, identity is not autonomous self-definition but relational responsibility; selfhood gains meaning through contribution to community. Colonialism violently restructured these relational systems, rendering rupture and loss enduring organising experiences of communal memory and identity formation. In this context, ritual and material culture function not as aestheticised motifs but as practical and ethical media of relational maintenance. Belonging is not declared identity but continuously reproduced responsibility. By contrast, Eastern European post-socialist experience often associates community with the over-determination and political instrumentalisation of national narratives. Here, community appears less as sustaining ethical framework than as ideologically burdened representational space, toward which artistic practice frequently adopts critical distance. Artistic autonomy is thus produced not through affirmation of communal identity, but through its suspension, displacement, or interiorisation. Fragmentation, irony, and visionary or unconscious layers operate not merely as aesthetic strategies but as responses to representational expectations that would position the artist as spokesperson of collective history. In this light, Chokuwamba’s and Nagy’s practices articulate two distinct yet comparable models of self-positioning. In Chokuwamba’s work, relation to community emerges as ethical responsibility: Shona identity functions not as ethnic or cultural label but as practice organised around care, inheritance, and intergenerational order. In Nagy’s practice, communal experience becomes perceptible indirectly, within internal spaces of subjectivity; collective ruptures manifest not iconographically but through psychic and bodily structures—persona, internal surveillance, fragmented imagery. In neither case is community thematised as content; rather, identity remains an open, provisional position sustained through artistic operation.

Self-Positioning and Suspension: Two Strategies of Resistance

Across both case studies, identity becomes accessible not as thematic content but as a position enacted through image-making. Resistance to institutionally offered identity readings, however, unfolds along different vectors.In Chokuwamba’s practice, resistance does not begin with distancing from collective identity but with its relational reconfiguration. Chair and gourd motifs operate not as representative signs but as carriers of personal micro-histories through which belonging becomes visible as ethical responsibility. Resistance emerges through personal filtration of inherited structures; the works withdraw representational authority by activating community not as identity category but as relational system. In Nagy’s work, resistance primarily occupies the internal organisation of subjectivity. Community often appears as ideologically over-determined speaking position; thus, painting’s first autonomous gesture lies in suspending internal control mechanisms. Resistance moves from inside outward: unconscious, visionary, fragmented imagery does not articulate collective experience but establishes pictorial states in which identity resists representational fixation. These strategies are not oppositional but structurally complementary. In both cases, identity remains open within the image-making process. Chokuwamba re-organises community as ethical relational network; Nagy suspends the internalised pressure of communal expectations. Resistance in neither practice takes the form of declarative negation, but of operational strategies that prevent institutional fixation of identity.

Conclusion

In contemporary artistic practice, identity is not a representational task but a process of self-positioning. Institutionally offered identity categories function not as neutral contexts but as interpretive frameworks structuring the conditions of artistic articulation. The examined practices demonstrate that artistic autonomy is not achieved through rejection of identity, but through sustaining its openness and unfixability. Identity thus emerges not as closed meaning, but as critical space produced through the operational logic of artworks.

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