Colonial memory, bodily disgust and the politics of looking
An artwork does not need to depict blood, decay, or a mutilated body to become disturbing. Sometimes the disturbance lies in what an image makes visible. Sometimes it lies in what a society has trained itself not to see. And sometimes the most unsettling artwork is the one that exposes the viewer's own expectations: the assumption that a body should be attractive, that suffering should be presented with dignity, or that historical violence should become easier to contemplate once it enters a museum.
The history of disturbing art is often told through a familiar group of European and American artists. Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon and Andres Serrano appear as milestones in a story about artists breaking the boundaries of acceptable representation. Their work matters, but this account can make one particular history of aesthetic rebellion seem universal. It suggests that artists everywhere are challenging the same definition of beauty, using the same language of transgression, for essentially the same reasons.
That assumption becomes difficult to maintain when we examine art shaped by colonialism, racial classification, nuclear warfare, state power and cultural memory. In these contexts, ugliness is not simply a visual quality. It can be a label imposed on certain bodies, a description used to discredit political expression, or a response to images that expose histories a nation would rather forget.
The more revealing question is therefore not whether beauty can accommodate ugliness. It is who has historically been permitted to define beauty, whose bodies have been classified as grotesque, and what happens when artists take control of those images themselves.
The grotesque is not an innocent category
The German philosopher Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, published in 1853, established ugliness as a subject worthy of serious philosophical investigation. His work examined the relationship between ugliness and the aesthetic ideals it disrupts. It offers a useful historical starting point, but the category becomes more complicated when we consider the social power behind aesthetic judgment.
The grotesque has never been only about distorted proportions, excessive flesh or unsettling combinations of human and animal forms. It has also served as a language through which societies mark certain people as inferior, uncivilised, sexually deviant or less fully human. What appears to be an aesthetic judgment can carry the force of a political classification.
Art historian Kobena Mercer has examined the relationship between the grotesque and racialised representation. His writing on Black artists and modernism challenges the assumption that modern art can be understood through supposedly universal aesthetic values without accounting for the racial and colonial histories that shaped them. In his scholarship, the history of modernism becomes inseparable from the histories of people who were excluded from its dominant narratives.
This changes how we approach an image of a distorted body. We must ask whether the distortion challenges an established visual order or repeats a history in which particular bodies were represented as excessive, primitive or repellent. The same visual strategy can have radically different consequences depending on who creates the image, who appears in it and who is looking.
The Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu makes this contradiction central to her work. Her collages combine human, animal, botanical and mechanical elements to produce hybrid female figures that are often simultaneously alluring and grotesque. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University describes her practice as a critique of colonialism, displacement, perceptions of Africa and the eroticisation of Black women's bodies.
Mutu's figures do not fit comfortably into categories of beauty or ugliness. They may appear seductive, threatening, damaged or powerful, sometimes all at once. Their bodies refuse the coherence expected of a conventional portrait, but their fragmentation also recalls the histories of representation that have treated Black women's bodies as objects to be classified, consumed and interpreted by others.
The important distinction is that Mutu does not simply reproduce an image of the grotesque. She makes it unstable. The hybrid figure can be read as evidence of violence, but it can also suggest transformation, survival and the invention of forms that escape established categories. What might once have been used to disqualify a body from beauty becomes a means of challenging the authority of beauty itself.
South Africa: when the act of looking has a history
In South Africa, the politics of representation cannot be separated from colonialism and apartheid. Photography, ethnographic display and racial classification helped construct and maintain distinctions between people. Black bodies were repeatedly made objects of observation, measurement and interpretation by institutions that claimed the authority to define them.
This history makes the apparently simple act of looking ethically complicated. A photograph can record a person, but it can also reproduce the unequal relationship between the person being photographed and the person who controls the image. A portrait may appear to offer visibility while still denying its subject authority over how that visibility is understood.
The South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi addresses this problem through photography. Their ongoing series Faces and Phases, begun in 2006, documents Black lesbian, transgender and gender-nonconforming people, building an extensive visual record of lives that have often been marginalised or rendered invisible. The project is not primarily an exercise in ugliness or shock. Its significance for this discussion lies in how it challenges the expectation that certain bodies should remain outside the respectable visual record.
A 2024 article by RocÃo Cobo-Piñero in the Journal of the African Literature Association examines how Muholi's work can reframe colonial portraiture and challenge the regimes of invisibility affecting transgender bodies in South Africa. The study argues that portraiture can become a counter-archive, one that contests the narrow constructions of identity inherited from earlier systems of representation.
This perspective complicates the idea that disturbing art must repel its audience. Sometimes the disturbing element lies not in the artwork's appearance but in the history it forces us to recognise. A dignified portrait can be politically confrontational when it places a person in a visual space from which society has excluded them.
Muholi's photographs also raise a question about the viewer's expectations. Who is accustomed to seeing themselves represented as complex, ordinary and worthy of attention? Who has historically been presented as a problem to be studied? And why should the visibility of a marginalised person be understood as a political intervention at all?
These questions become particularly important when art institutions celebrate images of suffering or marginalisation. There is a risk that the institution will turn the represented person into evidence of social injustice, while the viewer experiences the satisfaction of having confronted an uncomfortable subject. The photograph may challenge exclusion, yet the encounter can still reproduce the distance between the person looking and the person being looked at.
Muholi's work offers a different possibility. The portrait does not simply expose a vulnerable body to public scrutiny. It contributes to a record made by and for a community, asserting the right to self-representation. The issue is no longer whether the body meets an aesthetic standard. It is who possesses the authority to make that judgment.
The Black female body and the danger of aestheticising violence
The history of the Black female body in European visual culture reveals how closely ugliness, sexuality and racial power can become entangled. Colonial exhibitions and scientific classifications presented African women through claims about bodily difference. These representations did not merely describe bodies. They helped create a visual language through which racial hierarchies could appear natural.
The history of Sarah Baartman, the Khoekhoe woman exhibited in Europe during the nineteenth century, remains a particularly painful example. Her body became a public spectacle, interpreted through racialised ideas about anatomy and sexuality. The history of her display exposes the violence that can occur when a person becomes an object of curiosity rather than a subject with the right to determine how she is seen.
Contemporary African artists have returned to this history, but their work cannot be reduced to a single strategy of reclaiming the body. The South African artist Tracey Rose, for example, has used performance, photography and video to examine race, gender, identity and the inherited structures of representation. The Kenyan-born Wangechi Mutu constructs hybrid figures that challenge the visual conventions through which Black women have been eroticised and fragmented. These artists work differently, and their differences matter: one cannot assume that every depiction of the body is trying to repair the same historical injury.
A 2025 master's thesis at the University of Cape Town by Taylor Friar examines representations of the Black female body in the work of Wangechi Mutu, Tracey Rose and Lady Skollie. It investigates how artists engage with the colonial archive, grotesque imagery, fetishism and the politics of looking. Drawing on Tina Campt's A Black Gaze, the research argues for an approach based on looking with and alongside Black women rather than treating their bodies as objects to be examined.
The distinction is subtle but important. Looking at someone can make the viewer the centre of the encounter, granting them the authority to classify and evaluate. Looking with someone suggests a relationship in which the represented person is not simply available for interpretation. The viewer must consider their own position, the history of the image and the possibility that the person represented exceeds the meanings imposed upon them.
Not Waving, Drowning. Lady Skollie
This also exposes a problem in the celebration of transgressive art. An image of a racialised body may appear radical because it violates conventional taste, but it can still rely on the very spectacle that made the body vulnerable in the first place. The artist's intention does not automatically determine the viewer's response, and a gallery's claim to challenge prejudice does not guarantee that the work escapes the visual economy of objectification.
The question is not whether difficult images of Black bodies should exist. It is whether their difficulty opens a different way of seeing, or merely gives old forms of looking a new cultural legitimacy.
Japan: painting what should not be made beautiful
The Hiroshima Panels, created by Japanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki over several decades after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, offer a different approach to disturbing imagery. The large-scale works depict the human consequences of nuclear warfare, including injured bodies, death and the destruction of ordinary life. Rather than transforming the bombing into an abstract account of military power, the panels confront viewers with its physical and human consequences.
The paintings belong to a specific historical and political context. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the experience of postwar Japan, produced profound questions about how catastrophic violence could be represented. What could painting communicate about an event whose scale exceeded ordinary experience? How could artists depict suffering without turning it into a spectacle? And how could they remember the dead without making their pain serve a simple national narrative?
The Marukis' work does not resolve these questions through polished heroism. The bodies in the panels register the violence of the event in forms that can be difficult to look at. Their scale prevents the viewer from treating them as minor illustrations of a historical account. They confront the audience with a human reality that can disappear when nuclear warfare is discussed only through strategy, numbers, and geopolitical consequences.
The panels also complicate the idea that disturbing art must reject beauty altogether. Their compositions, use of line and monumental scale reflect artistic decisions that give the images visual force. Yet that force does not make the suffering agreeable. The tension between artistic construction and human devastation is part of what makes the work difficult.
This is not the same as saying that beauty redeems horror. Rather, the work demonstrates that aesthetic form can help sustain attention to suffering without making suffering itself desirable. The painting gives the viewer a way to remain with the image, but it does not offer an emotional escape from what the image represents.
A recent exhibition devoted to Japanese women artists after 1945 has also brought attention to the Hiroshima Panels alongside the work of artists such as Yoshiko Shimada, whose practice confronts Japan's imperial legacy and the history of so-called “comfort women”. This wider context matters because it prevents Japanese art from being reduced to a single narrative of national victimhood. The memory of Hiroshima exists alongside the history of Japanese imperial violence, and artists have addressed the difficult relationship between remembrance, responsibility and national identity.
The distinction matters. Disturbing art can challenge the erasure of victims, but it can also become part of a selective memory in which a nation remembers its own suffering while avoiding the suffering it inflicted on others. The ethics of representation therefore depend not only on what an artwork shows, but also on what its historical context allows it to leave out.
China: is destroying beauty an act of violence or criticism?
In 1995, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei produced Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, a photographic triptych documenting the moment he releases a roughly 2,000-year-old ceremonial vessel and allows it to shatter on the ground. The work is disturbing for a reason quite different from the bodily imagery associated with Bacon or Mutu. Its violence is directed at an object that carries cultural, historical and material value.
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Ai Weiwei
The act can be read as desecration. An ancient object is destroyed, and the photographs preserve that destruction as a work of contemporary art. But the work also raises questions about how cultural value is produced and who has the authority to define it.
The Guggenheim's educational materials describe the urn as a cultural object whose significance derives from its historical associations and the values invested in it. Ai's action challenges the assumption that age and cultural prestige automatically make an object sacred or beyond question. The work also recalls the destruction of traditional culture during China's Cultural Revolution, when the past was attacked in the name of revolutionary transformation.
The photographs make the act repeatable. The urn is gone, but the image survives and circulates. The destruction of an object becomes the means through which its value is discussed, and the artist's gesture becomes an object of institutional preservation. The contradiction is difficult to ignore: a work that questions the authority of cultural heritage acquires its own cultural authority.
Art historian Dario Gamboni's research on iconoclasm is useful here because it treats the destruction of images and objects as historically situated acts rather than assuming that destruction has a single meaning. Iconoclasm may express political hostility, religious conviction, cultural transformation or resistance to established authority. The act of breaking something does not explain itself; its meaning depends on what is destroyed, who destroys it and the values at stake.
Ai's work also exposes the relationship between artistic provocation and the international art market. The photographs became valuable works in their own right, even though their subject is the destruction of a valuable historical object. The gesture challenges established systems of value, yet it also produces a new commodity within those systems.
This is not necessarily a contradiction that invalidates the work. It is part of its meaning. The viewer must decide whether the destruction was justified, whether the photograph preserves what the action destroys, and whether the art institution can challenge cultural authority while profiting from the controversy it creates.
The discomfort here is not disgust at an ugly image. It is the realisation that our ideas about preservation, destruction and cultural value are less stable than we would like them to be.
Who benefits when suffering becomes art?
These examples bring us to a problem that cannot be solved by celebrating artistic freedom alone. Art can make suffering visible, but visibility is not inherently ethical. It can challenge prejudice, yet it can also turn marginalised people into symbols of injustice. It can preserve memories that institutions have neglected, while allowing those same institutions to present themselves as morally enlightened.
Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) remains an important point of reference for thinking about images of suffering. Sontag questioned the assumption that exposure to images of violence necessarily creates empathy or political understanding. Images may move us, but they can also become familiar, distant or consumable. Their effects depend on the context in which we encounter them and the stories we are given to understand them.
The same problem applies to disturbing art. A viewer may leave a gallery feeling that they have confronted something difficult, without having questioned the assumptions that shape their response. The artwork becomes proof of the viewer's willingness to engage with challenging material. Discomfort itself becomes a cultural achievement.
This danger grows when institutions treat transgression as a mark of sophistication. The artwork that offends conventional taste may become a desirable acquisition precisely because it offers collectors and museums the prestige of owning something controversial. The art market can turn resistance into a recognisable style, and the history of exclusion into a source of cultural value.
Yet the answer cannot be to demand that art provide a measurable moral benefit. That would reduce artistic practice to a form of instruction. An artwork may remain ambiguous, unresolved or even objectionable. It may expose a problem without telling us how to solve it.
What matters is whether we remain attentive to the difference between confronting an image and consuming it. Do we ask who made the work, whose experience it represents, what history it invokes and who controls its circulation? Do we recognise that the person depicted may have a relationship to the image that differs from our own? Can we admit that our discomfort may reveal something about the limits of our understanding rather than the failure of the artwork?
Beauty is not the opposite of violence
The artworks discussed here do not share a single aesthetic. Mutu's hybrid figures disturb the boundary between human and nonhuman. Muholi's portraits challenge histories of exclusion and visual classification. The Marukis' paintings insist on the bodily consequences of nuclear warfare. Ai Weiwei's photographs turn destruction into a question about cultural memory and value.
What connects them is not ugliness as a style. It is their refusal to accept that looking is a neutral act.
The conventional language of beauty often encourages us to imagine that aesthetic judgment exists apart from history. But the standards through which we judge bodies, objects and images are shaped by cultural memory and social power. They influence who becomes a subject of admiration, who becomes an object of curiosity, whose suffering is preserved and whose is ignored.
To question beauty, then, is not simply to celebrate what is ugly. Nor is it to assume that an offensive or disturbing work must be politically progressive. The grotesque can challenge an oppressive visual order, but it can also reproduce one. A beautiful image can conceal violence, but beauty can also sustain attention to experiences that would otherwise be ignored.
The more difficult task is to understand what a particular artwork does within its own history. That requires looking beyond immediate reactions and beyond the reassuring belief that discomfort automatically produces insight.
Perhaps we preserve artworks that refuse to be beautiful because they make visible the assumptions hidden inside our judgments. They show us that the boundary between beauty and ugliness is not only a matter of taste. It can be a boundary between the bodies a society values and the bodies it rejects, between the histories it remembers and those it prefers to forget.
An artwork that challenges that boundary does not necessarily ask us to admire what we see. It asks us to reconsider why we have learned to see it in that way.
And sometimes the most unsettling thing in the gallery is not the image itself. It is the history of looking that the image brings into view.
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