New Magical Realism

About

The premise is a critique of realities, as the artists know it, by way of invoking alterity - a shift in the perspective of this world - through artistic interference; aesthetic, political, ideological, religious, provocative and ameliorative ends.

As Colchester, uncomfortably, stacks a history of Boudicca against the central backdrop of Roman British life, the artists of New Magical Realism are similarly charged with the metaphor of recasting Celtic rebel Boudicca against a backdrop of European ascendency.

Taking post-modern literature as a starting point, Zenia’s character in Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Robber Bride’ (1993), is introduced visually as an image reflected in a smoky mirror, whose multiple and 'forever shape-shifting character functions as a catalyst for new and re-emergent traumas.' (Vickroy cited in Bouson 2010: 23)

From a European philosophical tradition, the Real is interpreted as a Romantic infinite, absolute or thing-in-itself - Das Ding an Sich. In the same way that the Real of Zenia’s truth, as a character, is eclipsed by Atwood’s compulsion to communicate subversive Magical narrative forces, so New Magical Realism purveys a multiplicity of forces upturning the natural order, like myth, fable and allegory.