She Swims in Silence: Spatial Narrative, Women's labor in Contemporary Art

Abstract

This thesis investigates the collective lives of Chinese women sent to Xinjiang in state-led migration after 1949 and the erasure of their gendered narratives. Drawing on a unique family history and archival evidence, the thesis reveals how the personal identities of these female “Aid to Xinjiang” participants were stripped away and subsumed under the grand socialist nation-building myth. Through practice-based artistic research, the project attempts to restore their lost voices and unacknowledged suffering and labor, framing the exhibition as a form of praxis. By analyzing the exhibition alongside case studies and critical analysis, the thesis, inspired by Bernard Stiegler’s theory of the “history of representational forms” and interwoven with ideas from philosophers like Judith Butler and Nicholas Mirzoeff, interrogates the gendered silences in official history and highlights the tension between state mythologies and personal memories. In doing so, the exhibition as an interdisciplinary form of research not only restores agency to a silenced group of women, but also demonstrates how artistic practice can serve as an alternative historiography to challenge dominant narratives and recover marginalized voices.