Dignity and voice in silence: contemporary female visual artists’ quiet empathy

Abstract

Museum visitors engage in silent contemplation establishing a connection with artistic objects. I argue that visual art that reduces linguistic impositions and discusses silence can trigger empathic critique. Focusing on the philosophy of silence, feminist approaches to visual arts and the study of collective memory in this form, I believe that female artists that work on silence overcome the paradox of talking about the absence of words by embracing the communicative power of these instances of quiescence. In order to access visibility in cultural memory, women have had to turn silence from imposed muteness into a discursive rebellion. Silence materialises in their work because the observer can perceive it. Through their senses, the museum visitor will recognise representations of silence and understand that, in these cases, these silences contain messages. Consequently, silence will break the modern tendency of indiscriminate chatter, in a space where aesthetics of contemplation allow empathy to be activated. To illustrate this, my article analyses the following visual artworks, giving an international dimension to the discussion, which emphasizes the universality of silence: Shirin Neshat’s short film Turbulent, Jennie C. Jones’s artwork Shhh #8, Caroline Halley’s photograph ‘The 5 Women’ and Doris Salcedo’s installation Plegaria Muda.