Aldiana Hoxha
“Sweet Mourning Lamb” uses the raw, imperfect texture of existence, where everything is already rotting, yet life stubbornly continues. It is a reflection on the human condition, explored through the metaphor of sheep living in a world full of decay.
Drawing from themes of suffering, redemption, and existential questioning found in Dante’s "Divine Comedy", Lora Webb’s "Encampment", John Berger’s "Why We Look at Animals?" and Ethel Cain’s "Ptolemaea", this work delves into the tension between innocence and decay, life and inevitable death.
In this decaying world, the sweet mourning lamb cries out for an answer. But why mourn what is inevitable?
This thesis explores the aesthetics of nude photography in Japan, focusing on Nobuyoshi Araki's controversial but significant depictions of the human body. This research explores how nude photography serves as a medium for social discourse and as an art form by looking at the philosophical, historical, and cultural influences that have shaped Japanese aesthetics.
Through defying conventional standards of gender, power, and sensuality, Araki's photography, especially his use of kinbaku, or Japanese rope bondage, places his work at the junction of social critique and artistic expression. His treatment of nudity, which is frequently presented as personal and intimate, calls into question cultural censorship, the monetization of the female body, and the disparities in how Western and Japanese audiences see his work. To comprehend the dynamic interplay between spectator, subject, and artistic aim, this thesis further integrates Araki's photography within larger aesthetic theories, such as those of Donald Keene, Arnold Berleant, and Immanuel Kant.
Aldiana Hoxha is an Irish Albanian artist based in Dublin specialising in black and white analogue photography. She is heavily inspired by narrative storytelling and uses philosophical classics and archaic photographic archives as bedrocks for her work.
Through her analogue and moving image works, she transforms the decaying world we live in, capturing even the microscopic dust that settles on her subjects as a way to investigate the unity of all things.
Her most recent works probe the versatility of animals and human parasocial connections within the wilderness.
“We are all one.”
