wissenderkuenste.de

‘Looking Back Forward_Quip Nayr’ is based on the Aymara concept of time and space called ‘qhip nayr’. As the Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui refers to it, ‘quip nayr’ is a way of looking into the past to orient your path to the future. I use this concept to reflect on processes of change, concerning language, identity and place. Expressing identity on fabric recuperates my ancestors’ tradition from the Andean region in Abya Yala (Latinamerica). The layering of textiles is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa, who uses fabrics as a synonym to talk about the construction of identity in her concept ‘Haciendo Caras’.

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.

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.