The dissertation Cross-Border Connections: Aesthetics of Bodies, Movements, and Border Experiences in Contemporary Art examines the Spanish–Moroccan border at the Strait of Gibraltar as an aesthetic–epistemic space. Rather than understanding the border as a fixed territorial line, the study conceptualizes it as a historically constituted assemblage produced through bodies, movements, and visual practices. From a distinctly feminist and postcolonial perspective, the dissertation analyzes contemporary artistic positions—particularly video works by Ursula Biemann, Randa Maroufi, Yto Barrada, and Irene Gutiérrez Torres—that render the border visible as a lived, traversed, and experienced space.
Central to the dissertation is the thesis that borders do not merely delineate geopolitical orders but are inscribed in bodies and, at the same time, are performatively produced through bodily practices. The study demonstrates how female bodies at the border become key sites in which colonial, patriarchal, and economic power relations are negotiated, and how artistic practices simultaneously render these inscriptions visible while unsettling and reconfiguring them. Art is thus understood not as mere representation, but as an epistemological practice that critically interrogates hegemonic knowledge regimes and generates alternative forms of situated knowledge emerging from the border itself.
Methodologically, the dissertation combines art-historical image analysis with approaches from border studies, post- and decolonial theory, and feminist theories of situated knowledge. By consistently interweaving historical visual discourses with contemporary artistic strategies, the study develops a polysemic artistic “cartography” of the Strait of Gibraltar. This cartography shows how regimes of visibility and invisibility, mobility, and body politics intersect and co-constitute one another within the border space.
A key contribution of the dissertation lies in the development of a feminist–postcolonial border aesthetics that conceptualizes oppression and agency not as opposing forces, but as coexisting dimensions. The analyzed artworks offer perspectives on everyday forms of agency that emerge precisely within the gray zones of hegemonic power relations. Overall, the dissertation makes an original and innovative contribution to art-historical border research by taking art seriously as a site of knowledge production and by rethinking the Strait of Gibraltar as an aesthetic, political, and epistemic nexus. In doing so, it not only offers new perspectives on border spaces and body politics, but also advocates for an art history that does not merely address borders as a subject, but thinks from the border itself.