This thesis analyses Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, showing how the installations simultaneously enable the subject’s emancipation and bind it to new discursive patterns of control. Its theoretical framework synthesises Michel Foucault’s ideas on recognition and power/knowledge, Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, Nikolas Rose’s government of the soul, and Berger and Luckmann’s theory of the social construction of reality. The study also considers the artist’s biography and her carefully crafted public persona. Mirrors and the endless repetition of dots propel visitors into continuous self recognition, thereby enacting Foucault’s logic of confession and visualising Butler’s model of fluid identity. Kusama’s persona reveals the paradox of the neoliberal individual, who realises freedom within the very mechanisms that simultaneously discipline the self.
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