The Body as Archive: Identity and the New Figurative

Transcript

SPEAKER_1: In our previous discussion, we explored eco-art's tangible impact on the environment. Today, let's delve into the historical and cultural significance of the human figure in art. SPEAKER_2: Indeed, figuration has returned, not as mere nostalgia, but as a means of cultural reclamation. The New Figurative movement challenges historical narratives by asking: who gets painted, who does the painting, and who is represented in museums? SPEAKER_1: Those three questions sound simple. But I'm guessing the answers were historically very narrow. SPEAKER_2: Extremely narrow. For most of Western art history, the portrait was a technology of power — reserved for the wealthy, the white, the male. The New Figurative movement is about reclaiming that technology for communities it systematically excluded. SPEAKER_1: This form inherently reflects the exclusion of certain communities. Can you provide an example of how this movement is reclaiming space for these voices today? SPEAKER_2: Consider Tschabalala Self, whose work for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, arriving September 10, 2026, embodies the idea of inclusivity. Her figures, stylized and architectural, challenge traditional narratives and assert cultural identity. SPEAKER_1: The work has also faced racist vandalism. SPEAKER_2: [short pause] Which is grim — but also clarifying. When a public artwork centered on embodied presence is met with racist vandalism, the public treatment of represented bodies becomes part of the work’s context in real time. SPEAKER_1: Now, there's a term I want to ask about — speculative historiography. What does that mean in practice? SPEAKER_2: It means artists use imagined portraits or fictionalized scenes to repair gaps in the historical record. For communities whose histories were suppressed, a painted figure functions as an alternative archive. The body holds memory, ancestry, trauma — things official records erased. So the portrait isn't illustrating history. It's constructing it. SPEAKER_1: So not documentation, but invention as a form of truth-telling. Mm-hmm. SPEAKER_2: Exactly. This extends into photography, as seen in Sunil Gupta's exhibition Life With a Camera, showcasing marginalized communities and reclaiming their narratives through classical composition. SPEAKER_1: Radical subject, classical form. That combination keeps coming up. What about craft — weaving, quilting, ceramics? SPEAKER_2: [inhale] The broader frame is labor: practices across disciplines connect contemporary figuration with identity, power, and resistance. Elevating them isn't just aesthetic. It's a direct challenge to the hierarchy that decided what counted as serious art in the first place. SPEAKER_1: And The Guardian reports that Style is the Body Thinking — a major show at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, open through December 5, 2026 — brings together 56 international artists doing exactly this work across six decades. SPEAKER_2: Right. The show explicitly connects figuration with identity, power, labor, and resistance. That's not a narrow art-historical claim. That's a full cultural argument, and it's happening globally. The New York Times reports that Dansaekhwa — the Korean monochrome abstraction movement — is shaping presentations at Frieze Seoul and Kiaf Seoul, in the week of August 31, 2026. A postwar Korean movement getting serious international recirculation. SPEAKER_1: So the canon is being rewritten from multiple directions simultaneously. And institutions are being held accountable too — Reuters reported the Met and John Galliano canceled a planned 2027 retrospective after backlash over his antisemitic remarks. SPEAKER_2: That's the pressure point. Identity and representation now directly determine whether an institution presents someone's work at all. And then there's Woo Jin Joo — The Guardian reports that Woo Jin Joo's first solo exhibition, Bodily Inbetweenness, opens at Ruup & Form in London on September 11, 2026. Joo draws on shamanism, folklore, and magical creatures to explore existing between categories — between bodies, between cultures. That's the New Figurative at its most expansive. SPEAKER_1: So the takeaway for anyone following this movement — the human figure isn't just a subject. It's an argument. SPEAKER_2: The New Figurative isn't a return to tradition. It's a reclamation of a tool that was used against certain communities for centuries, now turned in the other direction. The body as archive — carrying what official history left out, and insisting it be seen.