Constructed Realities (2019)
This ongoing body of work seeks to interrogate the assumed objectivity and authority of colonial narratives vis-à-vis the people and lands they colonized, and demonstrates the visual and textual representation of the ‘other’ as a means to legitimize European colonial domination. In the same vein that precise language and images were created and used to construct a ‘reality’ (of dominance, superiority, redemption, othering, fetishizing, infantilizing), this work layers disparate archival images as well as text – notably, abstract pages from Sir Frederick Lugard’s 1922 Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, the defining text on British colonial administration – in order to imagine other stories and alternative relationships between the colonizer and colonized. The use of fabric – cotton sheeting and chiffon – instead of (traditional) paper as printing material also serves to distort the accepted, “absolute” (Eurocentric) ways of knowing; fraying edges further unravel the threads of a dominant Western narrative.
Medium: Inkjet prints on chiffon and cotton sheeting, plywood tables, Perspex
