SESSION: The Epic as Form in Modern and Contemporary Art
This panel addresses the critical and conceptual potential of the epic as a form in modern and contemporary art practices. At a time of converging and interconnected crises – climate, fascist, humanitarian – this panel asks how – and why – modern and contemporary artists rethink the geographies, temporalities, and scales of the epic. Can the form of the epic make possible artistic projects that confront the past, reconfigure the present, or imagine possible futures? What kind of affect and public address does the epic enable?
From Homer’s The Odyssey to Derek Walcott’s Omeros (a postcolonial Caribbean reimagining of the former), epics are commonly structured as non-linear, episodic, and polyvocal narratives. They can be written, recited, or reenacted. They may grapple with themes of heroism, migration and displacement, home and community, history and memory, in miniature or monumental scale. Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, Shahzia Sikander’s The Scroll, Hew Locke’s The Procession, Kent Monkman’s mistikôwsiwak (Wooden Boat People), or Athi-Patra Ruga’s Future White Women of Azania are but a few examples of projects operating with the epic in mind.
We encourage interdisciplinary papers that engage with artistic practices across media and geographies, particularly from Global South and diasporic contexts.
Proposals are invited to consider specific topics in relation to the epic, such as allegory, narrative, intermediality, seriality, temporality, fragmentation, iteration, the speculative, futurity, polyvocality, and antiphony.
Elizabeth Harney will be the respondent to four papers, followed by a panel discussion.
Session Convenors:
Elizabeth Harney, University of Toronto
Ashley K. Raghubir, University of Toronto
Session Speakers:
Elena Sinagra, University of York
Polyvocality and Presence: Maud Sulter’s Zabat as Feminist Epic
In her 1989 series Zabat, Maud Sulter reimagines the nine Greek Muses by portraying contemporary Black women artists, writers, and intellectuals within her own network, such as Alice Walker and Lubaina Himid, as their modern counterparts. Extending beyond the photographic medium, the project includes Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree and nine prose poems, Zabat Narratives, each written to accompany a corresponding portrait. Through these interwoven forms, Sulter challenges the exclusion of Black women from both cultural and mythic canons.
This paper positions Zabat as a feminist epic of kinship, based on a counter-canonical project that contests patriarchal genealogies while envisioning new forms of belonging grounded in collaboration and connection. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography and Saidiya
Hartman’s critical fabulation, I argue that Sulter fuses myth, identity, and history through photography, poetry, and performative citation to articulate a polyvocal form of self-representation. In doing so, she transforms the epic allegory into a site of speculative repair, where myth and memory converge to restore presence to absence. As Sulter observes, “no one will document our future but ourselves.” By casting herself as Calliope, muse of epic poetry, Sulter positions herself both within and against the mythic tradition, reconfiguring the epic’s scale and temporality through a collective and relational lens. Each large-scale Cibachrome portrait, framed in gold, merges classical iconography with a feminist poetics of subversion, reclaiming mythic ancestry while transforming photography, a medium historically used to construct colonial and gendered hierarchies, into a vehicle for epic re-narration and resistance.
Saul Nelson, University of Cambridge
Jacob Lawrence’s Massacre in Boston: Violence and the Historical Epic
The second panel in Jacob Lawrence’s American Struggle series (1954-6) is titled Massacre in Boston. It shows the episode in the run-up to the Revolution when British soldiers fired on a crowd of colonists, killing five people, among them a Black man, Crispus Attucks. Depictions at the time show Attucks as one among others who died. But in Lawrence’s painting, the death of Attucks becomes the central heroic tragedy. It is also rendered ambiguous. Lawrence shows no British soldiers. He puts Attucks in the middle of a crowd of white American colonists, wearing the yellow and blue of Washington’s continental army. Blood flows from the fist of the colonist standing over Attucks.
It is impossible to look at this painting without drawing the conclusion, in spite of our knowledge of history, that it is this American colonist who kills Attucks, and not some redcoat’s bullet. The visual connection between the bloody fist and Attucks’ bleeding face is simply too strong. The painting suggests that this primordial episode of violence, at the birth of the American nation, involved the infliction of violence on Black Americans by other Americans. The history of independence becomes implicated in this primal violence.
My paper will explore Lawrence’s subversive use of historical epic – his occlusion of key details and figures, his emphasis on violence, his use of deceit, laughter, and even cunning, in order to tell a story of the nation able to speak back to its most powerful myths.
Derrick Ryan Claude Mitchell, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
(Q&A: Ryann Donnelly PhD, University of Sussex and Julia Hölzl PhD, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)
A Life’s Work: Performance Art as dramaturgy for Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic
The Epic as a form of storytelling is one of the oldest in human history, existing across cultures and connecting the human story through time. Performance Art is one of the “newest” forms of art, but a medium comparable to the Epic for its embrace of the poetic, extreme, and almost supernatural nature of the human experience.
This paper considers the dialogue between these two forms through a focus on the new work of performance artist Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic. Its argument is twofold: first, that the artistic and social engagement of the work establishes its status as a contemporary epic in singular ways; and second, that this work allows us to see Abramovic’s work in performance art since the early 1970s as preparatory and investigative—a dramaturgical medium to culminate in this contemporary Epic.
By re-contextualising works by her which have historically been labelled ‘performance art’, such as Rhythm 0 (1974) and Art Must Be Beautiful (1975), as the ‘trials and tribulations’ of Abramović as the Epic’s protagonist. We further argue that her more recent “recreations” only reinforce the cultural vocabulary needed for the universe of the Epic. Finally, we will establish how the Balkan Erotic Epic draws from past work, Balkan folklore, choreography, mourning and marital ritual, and the collapse of personal and political memory invokes the temporal play, polyvocality, and antiphony of the epic form.
This paper will expand the definition of the contemporary epic and make a needed and timely contribution to scholarship on Abramović and Performance Art.
Nicola Foster, University of Suffolk
The Heroism of Migrants across the Sea: Ai Weiwei’s Odessey (2016)
The epic form in which a heroic figure returns home having survived a dangerous journey has been abandoned by many modern writers. The heroic figure itself became problematic, and the promise of a safe return to their previous ‘home’ was no less problematic.
And yet, following his complex project turned into a film titled Human Flow (2016), during which Ai Weiwei gathered many migrant’s stories, Ai produced a work which utilised Homer’s famous title Odessey (2016). Homer’s epic poem is an account of a dangerous journey and a safe return home. Ai Weiwei questions the central theme in Homer: safe return home. The refugees are fleeing their old home, which is now destroyed, while their new home becomes a promise in a dream, since the reality is an unwelcoming home. Ai explores the theme in a number of ways, contrasting the Chinese cosmology of flow with the Western cosmology of conflict. The paper will explore Ai’s several works on the theme between 2015 and 2020 and the way in which Ai plays with, and between, the two cosmologies and the two traditions in an attempt to address what, on the one hand, was presented as a crisis and on the other as a tragedy, using the format of the epic.