The diploma thesis Xenomorphosis examines my painting and printmaking practices as a system in which heterogeneous visual fragments enter, collide and transform one another. Images sourced from popular culture, film, advertising and the internet function as alien elements which, when displaced into a new context, retain traces of their origins while simultaneously altering the environment they enter. Through the concepts of the foreign element, contamination and mutation, I analyse collage, rupture, excess, humour and the transitions between digital, graphic and painterly processes. The theoretical framework draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Julia Kristeva, Alenka Zupančič, Gillian Rose, Wojciech Drąg and Nadja Gnamuš, as well as Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s theory of metamodernism. Rather than resolving heterogeneity into a harmonious whole, the thesis proposes that meaning emerges through the tensions, interruptions and contradictions between constituent elements.
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