The Past in Presence/In the Presence of the Past: Creating ‚Fair Play‘, a 3D Installation

Ausgabe #8

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.

The Work of Contemporary Art and Commemoration: Reading Ali Kazimi’s Fair Play (2014)

Ausgabe #8

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.