Meaning Making
Subjective Value of the Traditional Silver Omani Jewellery View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amal Al Ismaili
Although traditional Omani jewellery is considered to be one of the invaluable crafts in the cultural heritage of the Sultanate, subjective value of the traditional Omani jewellery has been overlooked. Previous studies dealt with traditional Omani jewellery only as objects. This observation led me away from studying traditional silver Omani jewellery as objects and towards research examining the subjective value of the traditional jewellery. The aim of this research is to understand the subjective values associated with Omani traditional jewellery, based on the knowledge acquired from oral interviews with Bedouin women who are both makers and wearers of this jewellery. In this research, ethnography is based on qualitative research that uses informal semi-structured questions through snowball sampling and photo elicitation methods. Fieldwork undertaken in Oman explored the subjective values of traditional Omani jewellery and identified 14 subjective values in traditional Bedouin jewellery.
Storytelling in/through Arts: Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoblom’s Palimpsest Documents from a Korean Adoption View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lan Dong
This study examines how Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoblom’s graphic memoir Palimpsest Documents from a Korean Adoption draws the reader’s attention to the complexity of international adoption and its lasting impact on the adoptees. Born in South Korea, Sjoblom was adopted when she was two years old and grew up in Sweden. Documenting and reflecting on her personal journey of struggling with her identity as a child and searching for her birth parents in South Korea as an adult, Sjoblom questions the common image of international adoption as a humanitarian act that welcomes the other across geographical and cultural boundaries. Following the central question––who owns the story of an adoption, her book takes advantage of comics’ formal conventions, such as: panels, gutters, inserts, and dialog bubbles to unfold an engaging narrative simultaneously personal and political. In particular, this paper explores how the interruption of the temporal and spatial arrangements of the panels with maps, excerpts of emails, and archival documents creates meaningful gaps, how it connects the narrator’s ambiguous racial positioning with the complex layers in the “transnational adoption industrial complex” (McKee), and how it visualizes and problematizes the notion of hospitality on both sides of the adoption process.
Found Objects: Re-establishing Meaning at Different Scales View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Torrey Tracy, David Baird
So much of our life is determined by things out of our control. We don’t choose the moment in history or where we are born. We don’t choose our race, determine our biological/chemical makeup or choose our family. We are all dealt a unique set of circumstances from which it is almost impossible to escape. What we do have control over is our response to those circumstances. It always helps to start with a clear, objective understanding of the given situation, but after that, our response and choices determine the outcome. Found objects, irrespective of scale, relate to a specific time, and can have a pre-existing meaning, purpose, and logic (deep structure). Unlike most artists who utilize found objects as a cynical alternative to producing an original, unique work, we suggest these objects should serve as a given set of circumstances awaiting our response – an opportunity to express our limited but transformational agency. Work utilizing found objects can confront our troubled history - events that are forgotten or marginalized. Our response can ultimately transform and elevate the meaning of the found object. This paper establishes a history of found objects in contemporary art and attempt to re-establish their meaning though two case studies at radically different scales. First, a sculptural investigation that utilizes the Asian takeout food container and accompanying chopsticks. Secondly, the ruins of a former grocery store in rural Mississippi where Emmett Till allegedly whistled at the store’s white owner and, as a result, was brutally murdered.
