The Space of Thirdness: Intermediating performative treatments in artists’ moving image

In this chapter, I focus on how the screen in contemporary artists’ moving image might function as an intermediate space that performatively treats divisive social issues such as sexism, racism and ecological damage. Focusing on Rehana Zaman’s Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena, 2016, and Jeamin Cha’s Sound Garden, 2019, I explore how both films differently engender such an intermediate space in which the oppositional conflicts that arise from said social issues can be played with rather than reactively defended against. I argue that such performativity has the potential to unhinge psychic life from what feminist relational psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin calls ‘the dangers of complementarity’ which involve the either/or positionalities of asserting power over another or succumbing to the power of the other. To bypass this double bind, Benjamin developed the concept of ‘thirdness’, which I use as a metaphor to think through the performative treatments proffered in my two case studies.