wissenderkuenste.de

In June 2019, I held the workshop cooking, playing and sharing at the symposium sharing/learning: methods of the collective in art, research and activism by the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg “Das Wissen der Künste”, Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), at/in cooperation with District * School without Center.

I invited guests to explore how to come together spontaneously, creatively and intuitively for preparing a feast without previously knowing the recipe and without a recipe. The main idea was how to make a meal with the ingredients, we would have available, and share it between the participants of the event. Noncooking Knowledge was required. As it usually happens in my proposals, the practice has taken other directions.

For Issue 8 of wissenderkuenste.de, filmmaker Ali Kazimi has contributed five images from an anaglyph version of his installation Fair Play. The principle is simple: Each stereo image consists of a pair of images: one for the left eye and the other for the right eye. All stereo viewing systems seek to isolate the images, so the left sees only the one intended for it, and the right sees the one intended for it. Our brain creates the perception of a 3D image while viewing a 2D screen by fusing these two slightly offset images together. Fair Play brings together all strands of Kazimi’s research including stereoscopic 3D filmmaking, stereoscopic 3D photographic history and images, as well as early twentieth-century Canadian immigration history and colonialism.

In response to this issue’s call to “engage aesthetic processes of remembering,” this paper analyses Fair Play (2014), a stereoscopic 3-D cinema installation by Toronto-based filmmaker Ali Kazimi. Produced in conjunction with the centennial anniversary of the arrival and detainment of the Komagata Maru steamship in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the installation engages in an act of critical commemoration by imagining the lives of members of the South Asian diaspora affected by this incident. I argue that by centering affect within the formal and conceptual framework of the installation, Kazimi produces a decolonial aesthetic that restructures our relationship to this past, bringing to the fore ways of living and knowing that had previously been devalued and violently erased by colonial agendas and neoliberal art historical critiques.