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Listening appears as a research strategy: listening to remember, to resonate, to fill the gap, to unpack, to participate, to endeavour, to write, to read, to represent, to witness, to change, to resist, to learn, to un-learn, to dream, to imagine, to meditate, to fall, to question, to reveal, to travel, to envision, to feel, to wonder, to ask, to think, to navigate, to dig, to bind, to murmur, to say loud, to share, to commit, to repair, to speak out, to meet, to hear, to dwell … in becoming. 

With her photographic series Character Recognition (2006–2007) U.S. artist Myra Greene examines historical constructions of race and racist ways of looking from a perspective that undermines the assumed neutrality of photography. She transforms the old ambrotype technique and encourages to reflect on the power that visual technologies hold over the representation of race and identity. Greene recalls yet disobeys nineteenth-century ethnographic visual practices and looking instructions, creating a technical and metaphorical deferral of the past into the present and of the present into the past. Her photographic practice unveils the ongoing violent effects of nineteenth-century scientific racism on present-day bodies and embodied ways of looking. At the same time, Character Recognition gives new life to the archives of visual colonialism and experiments with photographic representation and body memory as tools for decolonial options of non-normative (visual) spaces.

In a set of para-fictional texts which interweaves the life of cultural historian Dr. Shahidul Zaman with key moments in the ruptured history of Bangladesh, the artist Omar A. Chowdhury, builds a reflexive mirror to examine the nature of memory, of historiography, and the processes of the art system. Recounting the history of an exhibition that was censored and closed down in Dhaka in 2016, Chowdhury constructs a narrative that doubles back on itself along multiple axes of the personal and public as he and Dr. Zaman delve into the uncertainties in the presentation of identity, the recollection of history, and the compromises of political commitment.