Allison Chen

podcast, painting

 

My project engages with death, mortality, and the multiplicity of beliefs that can stem from one society. In the reading Towards a Post-Secular Aesthetics : Provocations for Possible Media in Afterlife Art, Abou Farman really explores what it means to face death. My project deeply explores what death and the afterlife mean to people. Farman focuses on what bodies and objects mean after they have been taken away from their original context; whether it's someones ashes spread upon a mountain or a family heirloom in the MET. My podcast expanded upon the question “What does it mean to pass away?” One quote from Farmans reading that stood out to me and inspired this proposal is : “In a secular order, a person – as a locus of rights and interests, as a possessor of consciousness – is separable from the body… However, within a secular frame, this separation is unidirectional: whereas the secular body can outlive its person, the secular person cannot outlive its body.”