Moments of Meaning-Making

From a major figure in feminist cultural theory, a deep abecedarian reflection on a lifetime of art and analysis

Dutch theorist and video artist Mieke Bal is well known for her specific ways of "deep reading" works by artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois and Nalini Malani. She intertwines her research with various disciplines, including contemporary and 19th-century literature, psychoanalysis, gender studies, philosophy and biblical studies, and she has always approached her video art as a specific form of cultural analysis. When ruminating on how she could best reflect on a full life with different roles and experiences, she did not want to write a navel-gazing autobiography. Instead, she decided on an ABC of memories and the concepts these have generated: key terms that have a specific value to her, that interlink as a mesh of meaning, weaving together daily experiences and teaching, her know-how in artmaking and the core concepts of her analytical work.
Mieke Bal (born 1946) is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and curator who found the Visual and Cultural Studies postgraduate program at the University of Rochester. She has edited or authored more than 46 books, including The Architecture of Loneliness (Valiz, 2024).