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A Pedagogy of the Unrepresentable: Encounters with Monochromatic Abstract Art

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A Pedagogy of the Unrepresentable: Encounters with Monochromatic Abstract Art

Sedighiankashi, Reza (2025) A Pedagogy of the Unrepresentable: Encounters with Monochromatic Abstract Art. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

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Abstract

We use images in pedagogy as if they should always explain themselves. But what if they don’t? What if they remain silent, resistant, opaque, or ambiguous? This thesis focuses on monochromatic abstract images, particularly those in black, as a means of interrupting dominant habits of perception and exploring how visual opacity can open new pedagogical possibilities. It examines how images that withhold meaning might invite presence, attention, and forms of learning that emerge in a more slow and affective way and without predetermined results. Rather than providing strategies for interpreting or decoding images, this study engages abstraction as a space of friction, where perception is slowed, disrupted, or suspended. Engaging works such as Malevich’s Black Square, selected cinematic images, and past works from my own studio practice, alongside my experiences as an educator, I consider how images that resist comprehension can disrupt or disturb pedagogical habits and open space for learning that is based in unknowing. Pedagogical encounters with abstraction can also shift the role of the image, from something to interpret to something that exerts pressure and creates disorientation. In unravelling these gestures across the chapters, I consider black as a condition—something that unsettles perception, thought, and pedagogy, rather than something fixed or easily understood as colour. I explore this condition through the figure of the black hole, which is offered not merely as a metaphor for gravity, void, or disappearance, but as a diagram for thinking the unknowable within pedagogical experience. Drawing from post-qualitative and non-representational theories of education, I develop concepts and pedagogies of refusal, drift, delay, and disappearance—gestures that interrupt normative habits of perception and teaching. Through tracing these gestures, this thesis proposes a pedagogy of the unrepresentable: a pedagogy that does not aim for clarity and instead holds space for the unknown, the ineffable, and for the affective dimensions of learning.

Divisions:Concordia University > Faculty of Fine Arts > Art Education
Item Type:Thesis (Masters)
Authors:Sedighiankashi, Reza
Institution:Concordia University
Degree Name:M.A.
Program:Art Education
Date:18 July 2025
Thesis Supervisor(s):beier, jessie
Keywords:art education, abstraction, monochrome, opacity, ambiguity, non-representational pedagogy
ID Code:995781
Deposited By: Reza Sedighiankashi
Deposited On:04 Nov 2025 15:05
Last Modified:04 Nov 2025 15:05

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