Bridging the Thesis: Alumni Presentation/Q&A and Thesis Exhibition

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• Lucy Bink's thesis Performing Hysteria: Psychiatric portraits of hysteric patients and their impact on female representation analyzes the portrayal of women diagnosed with hysteria and its lasting impact on Western female representation. Centering 19th-century portraits at Hospital Salpêtrière in Paris, Lucy Bink reexamines hysteria as a patriarchal construction, visual language, and framing. Through archival visits and contemporary feminist art, she unpacks power dynamics in the patient-doctor and subject-photographer relationship. Drawing on theories of Judith Butler and Martha Rosler, the paper connects historical images of hysteria to contemporary acts of protest, particularly through the stage presence of women in (post)punk performance. Bink asks how the label of “hysteric” continues to shape perceptions today, and ways it can be reclaimed. The paper concludes with a vital call: we need more hysterical women.
• Nadia Abadjieva’s thesis The Autobiography of My/A Car examines the intrusive obsessiveness over people, materials, stories but mostly objects and the way that this obsessive or rather romantic nature positions and merges one towards the other, the subject towards the object and vice versa. This phantasmagorical approach of perceiving the interactions of humans and objects as a relationship is where the storytelling, supported by different philosophical theories, becomes the core of this paper. Usage if the Car's perspective in the storytelling of this paper, in itself, dismantles the Kantian theory of that the object is the human appliance of a concept. In a linguistic sense, choosing the poetic over the literal allows these stories to evoke strong feelings and impressions through given relations, especially the central one. The impressionistic love letter and the homage to the amalgamation of the two, you and FJ. (abstract written by Luka Boduljak)