Amassed over more than 30 years and housing hundreds of works of artists from around the world, the Western Front Media Archive encapsulates an incredible span of time and space. To compose any singular narrative on the archive would be a flawed exercise. Rather, the gaps in my understanding of its history and in the selection of the works for this curatorial project are inevitable and integral, since an archive is an inherently disjointed project of memorization and memorialization.¹

In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida describes the archive as being impaired in its memory functions. He states a drive of loss, death and destruction compels the creation and institution of the archive. However, the archive is constantly under the threat of this death drive, inciting eradication of anything that cannot be reduced to a conservable unit of memory. The archive thus depends on disjointed impressions of that which could be reduced and recorded in the archive.²

In this paradoxical position of the archive, Derrida gives power and agency to “consignation.” In addition to the meaning entrustment, he defines consignation as “gathering together signs.” ³ He then proposes, “There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority.” ⁴ The archive thus exists in relation to the outside, an external subject gleaning and bringing together signs or indexes of memory from without.

Within such complex relations as that of memory to the archive, I start with the question: what lies between here and now of where my body is grounded, and there and then of the works in the archive? Perhaps in response to this question of time and space, naturally raised when dealing with any archive, I was drawn most strongly to works that highlight the jarring disconnect between the specific places referred to in the artworks, and the social spaces imagined by them. This disconnect is psychically similar to gaps in personal, cultural and institutional memories that characterize archives.

The works of Chip Lord, Mona Hatoum, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, and Antonia Hirsch highlight the inconsistency between place (the physical site the video refers to) and space (the site of converging human relations). Since video as a medium makes malleable the way in which a place is depicted, it plays with the viewers’ expectations of how a social space is imagined. Video is a medium that allows artists a certain control over time and space by amassing their own archive of images and sounds. Through this process, artists can shape the viewers’ understanding of the places their works refer to, and offer alternative sites of discourse. Derrida reminds us that the control of the archive has profound political orientation, ⁵ and in gathering together these four works, I hope to reinvigorate the discursive sites that these artists sought to open through their practices.

Chip Lord’s 1979 video YVR: Arrival and Departure is exemplary in the way it contrasts the physical site of the Vancouver Airport with that of an imagined space of luxury that airline companies market. Shot at the airport, a hub that is designed to connect one place to another, the video shows the artist held captive at YVR, bound in time during which his activities are limited to reading journals, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, twiddling his thumbs and occasionally making phone calls. This portrayal of YVR makes evident the spatial architecture of the airport that fosters individual activities and discourages communal ones. This uncomfortable, individuated and dislocating experience of air travel is compared to the capitalist language of mileage reward programs like “The United Airline’s Executive Air Travelers.”⁶

At the beginning of the video, the artist is shown at his office, collecting “destination city strips,” bronze, silver or gold, depending on the frequency of the travel, and displaying them on a complimentary plaque.⁷ The language of the reward program literature is dotted with words like “executive,” “plateaus and levels,” “destinations,” ⁸ further confirming this collecting process as territorial and expansionist, as well as a demonstration of class status and privilege. This plaque is given visual prominence in the video to an absurd degree. Lord makes certain that the plaque is visible as he carefully tucks it under his arm when moving through the airport, and resting it on counters whenever given the opportunity.

Lord mocks the cult of speed and mobility in North America by showing the traveler who is not going anywhere. This video can be considered in relation to the artist’s history of collaborative practice as Ant Farm, which involved driving a modified Cadillac through a pyramid of burning televisions on American Independence Day in 1975, and burying 10 Cadillacs along an interstate highway in 1974.⁹ Lord challenges the idea of travel as a naturalized activity and speed as progress. Instead, he points to the unbridgeable gulf between what is marketed as executive to what is bodily felt as disruptive, and encourages viewers to consider the economic and social relations of power behind air travels.

As someone who critiques the very medium that he uses, Lord also points to his own ambiguous position as an executive air traveler by inserting himself in the video. The artist as a globetrotter has become a familiar image now in a globalised art market, and as Miwon Kwon notes over 20 years later in One Place After Another, “the success and viability of one’s work are now measured by the accumulation of frequent flyer miles.” ¹⁰ Kwon states that the status of the artist/scholar as globe trotter is rewarded with cultural and economic capital, even while they suffer “the inconveniences and psychic destabilizations of ungrounded transience.”¹¹

On the flip side of this image of the executive traveler, the weary traveler who feels disconnected from the places s/he calls home have become equally familiar. For some, travel is the source of serious misgivings and grievance. For London-based, Lebanon-born Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, the psychic and physical dislocation of being in a permanent state of exile often transpired into works that involved her own body. In December 1983, she staged Bars, Barbs and Borders – The Negotiating Table at the Western Front.¹² In the carefully considered video documentation of this live work,¹³ the camera slowly zooms out to reveal the artist’s body, bloodied and covered in entrails, wrapped in plastic and bound at the feet and the head. This body is placed on top of a table with empty chairs set around it. As this horrific image becomes clear, the sound clips from political debates around the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) gradually increase in volume. While the visual impact of a mangled body evokes the brutality of the war that has torn apart the artist’s family, the voices merely repeat the same kind of political language that politicians today use to talk about ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hatoum’s work operates on two levels that seem unbridgeable in their disparity. First, the voices, presumably from Western politicians talking about the violence and possibility of peace in Lebanon, are fragmented and incessantly repeat themselves. Snippets of the voices saying, “billions and billions of dollars on arms overseas,” “we’re a nation with global responsibility,” and “protecting our own,” ¹⁴ create a sense of the political arena that is far removed from the reality of the war on the ground, and of politicians concerned foremost with diplomatic leverage. On the other hand, the mutilated body on the table confronting the viewers of the live work (and the video documentation) evokes an entirely different space from the site of its staging.

Paralyzed under the light of a single bulb, the artist makes visible her “silent suffering and personal powerlessness.” ¹⁵ Not unlike Chip Lord picking up a journal with the headline “Iran Boils Over Again” at a newsstand at the airport to relieve boredom while waiting, a psychological border is often erected when confronting such a politicized and traumatic subject. Hatoum’s exhibition The Entire World as a Foreign Land held at Tate Britain in 2000 refers to the remark by Edward Said, “Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons.” ¹⁶ Physical, psychological and/or sociological borders have the crippling effect of dislocating and displacing those in transit, but they also mark interesting points of departure for those who attempt to cross them.

Chicano artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes have consistently explored the idea of borders in their practice in an attempt to transgress them. Dangerous Border Game, their interactive performance event held in 1996 in the Grand Luxe Hall at the Western Front, addresses the struggles around the United States/Mexico border. In addition to referencing the physical border that separates the two countries, the artists dismantle the systematically drawn social and cultural borders that tear apart races and cultures, by appropriating images from the mainstream media of Latino gangs and Mexican migrant workers and putting them into a different context. The performance stage is a cacophonous collection of visual signs such as hanging chickens, an led sign board,¹⁷ candles and crosses. Amid these objects, the duo plays the stereotyped role of Latino gang members, posing with weapons and a bottle of liquor, putting themselves on display for the audience and challenging them to question their subject positions.

When asked if they are concerned about misreading of their work which is intentionally multivalent and polysemantic, Gómez-Peña replied, “We now know that [even] obvious ethical and ideological borders are mere illusions, that the enemy is everywhere, even inside of us – especially inside of us. I think that in these senses, we cannot possibly assume one clear political position in the performance.” ¹⁸ Rather, he states, his performances try to “open up spaces of ambiguity where there are contradictory voices and contradictory ideas clashing in front of the audience.”

One of the ways in which the artists achieve this in the performance is by putting themselves in an ambivalent state of the victim/victimizer. Toward the end of their performance, Sifuentes takes one of the chickens hanging by the neck from the ceiling, and without warning, violently pounds it to pulp with a police baton. Even if the fact that migrant workers are derogatorily referred to as pollos or chickens and hung by the Texas Rangers remains unknown to the audience,²⁰ Sifuentes’ aggression toward this pathetic chicken suggests that it is a metaphor for broader conditions of those who are caught at physical and social borders and subjected to inhumane treatment. After this horrific beating, Sifuentes gently gathers the pulverized chicken carcass and holds it to his chest, an act of identification with what he had just destroyed.

The few feet of land that separate Mexico from the United States continue to be a place of haunting memories and images for many individuals, but this border is also represented in a certain way in the public media memory. Andreas Huyssen argues in “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” the current state of “the structures of public media memory make it quite understandable that our secular culture today, obsessed with memory as it is, is also somehow in the grips of a fear, even a terror, of forgetting.”²¹

Considering today’s memory and image production industry that circulates images at an ever-increasing speed, the archive may seem like a reliable place to turn to for memories in preservation. Yet, Derrida would caution and Huyssen would agree, the memory in the archive is not to be trusted or taken at face value. The onus is on those who turn to signs in the archive to recall what is no longer present. In this amnesic age of cyberspace and speedy proliferation of images, Huyssen recommends “productive remembering” as a remedy to the fear of forgetting.²²

Antonia Hirsch’s 1998 video installation Empire Line,²³ remembers the colonial history by connecting contemporary travel with the economic and political network established from the colonial trade routes. The title of her work evokes names of luxury cruise liners as well as referring to the style of the dress worn by the artist in the video. Also, hundreds of tea bags that make up the dress point to the British Empire’s tea industry. As one of the most valued goods shipped to Europe from the former British colonies like India, tea has become a key ingredient in an important British social ritual. By deliberately steeping herself and the tea in the water, the artist ruins the tea, taking away the value of the goods that circulated in the abusive system of supply from the colonized and demand by the colonizer. In a poignant metaphor, she brings this cycle to a temporary halt.

References to travel in this work is not lost on Peggy Gale, who states, “The ‘line’ is a route traced as well, a path of action, a manner of speaking, a means of production (factory assembly line) or travel (railway and steamship line), lines of force, a chain of command, lines learned. Indeed, the line of ‘progress.’ With the twentieth century, the Age of Empire receded, though its stains continue despite repeated attempts at cleansing.” ²⁴ This line in Hirsch’s work is not the straight line of progress, but one that loops over and over again like the video itself. In the loop, spaces of privilege and luxury, and of liminality caught in the chain of economic and social exploitation collide and clash.

This collision heightens the state of ambivalence that characterizes Hirsch’s work. The tea seeping out as the artist dips herself in the water is both serene and disturbing; the tea as a commodity dissipates in the water while the reddish haze from the tea simulates blood, blood that was – and continues to be – shed over global politico-economic struggles. Furthermore, this work complicates the idea of travel by productively remembering the devastating colonial history and forceful resource extraction from what are now labeled Third World countries. It also implicates contemporary vacationers to these countries, often marketed as a tropical paradise, in the uncomfortable realities of continued inequities and exploitations in the world.

Spaces of privilege and liminality are alternately evoked in the works presented in Between Here and There, Now and Then. These videos capture moments of friction on a journey from one place to another, and confront the viewers with borders that leave open a space of ambivalence. Lord takes on this idea of a journey most directly by playing the role of a willing participant in the Executive Air Traveler Program, while questioning the space of privilege that airliners describe. Similarly, Hirsch looks at travel as an enterprise based on the global structures of economies. Unlike Lord, however, Hirsch emphasizes the history of empire building that has reconfigured the social geography of the world. On the other hand, Hatoum provides a sobering reminder that some journeys leave groups of people in a permanent state of exile, while Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes deconstruct the border, the line that may provide the illusion of safety on one side but erect a prison on the other.

Together, these works are not meant to be representative of the Western Front Media Archive as a whole. Rather, I present them as an exercise in productive remembering in a globalized world, saturated with rapidly moving images and sounds. Among the excess of images in the collective public memory today, the works of Lord, Hatoum, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes, and Hirsch take the viewers on a journey that is marked by their own state of ambivalence and troubling border crossings.

Spanning nearly four decades, the Western Front Media Archive is a storehouse of traces, a vast body of resonant actions from a previous cultural season, a series of reference points from which to construct plural histories, necessarily incomplete. Since the centre’s inception in 1973, the Western Front “has been committed to creating video and audio documentation of its diverse artistic activities. As well, it continues to house the video artworks and documents produced by artists in residence during their stay.” ¹ Having been invited to explore this archive and listen carefully to how these works continue to speak, I have to ask: what is our relationship to the past and how may we access this relationship through what remains? How does cultivating an association with history through these traces change the spirit of the marks themselves? Intending to draw attention to the archive as an act of remembrance, and the reciprocal experience of any attempt to fathom its contents, the selected works of Cioni Carpi, Tom Sherman, Dalibor Martinis and Kate Craig highlight the cooperative agency in constructing a rapport with our pasts, presents and futures. These are ghost dialogues.

Cioni Carpi’s Interview for the Birds (1977) presents an erudite young female interviewing an older male artist. Her questioning temper is highly intellectualized and the man promptly asks her to speak in a less academic tone of voice. As she nonetheless continues on in her artspeak, the interview subject proceeds to get more and more agitated – pacing the room, crawling on the floor, speaking in the song of birds. And yet, she doesn’t seem to be so concerned with her subject, nor too terribly interested in his answers. Though occupying roles intended for thought conveyance, they are not partaking in a dialogue with each other. This discord is reinforced by the quality of the image. Filmed with two cameras, the representation reveals ghosts of both the man and the woman, their fuzzy doubles becoming more pronounced as they move behind or in front of their proper place as interviewer and interviewee.

Interview for the Birds exemplifies a failed attempt to converse between generations, and we are reminded of as much when the awkward couple disagrees about recorded history. “No, I never said that,” insists the artist. “Oh yes you did, it’s here. You said it. Are you saying you didn’t say it? How can you say you didn’t say it, if it’s here?” implores the questioner, pointing to a sheet of paper.² Archives of any sort pose a challenge to memory as they stand in as the bearers of history, tangible artifacts meant to signify intangible experiences. And no clear method presents itself as an intermediary to reconcile these types of contrary claims. What seems obvious from this dispute is that simply pointing at the remnants of the past is not good enough to learn anything factual or philosophical from them. There is no enlightenment to be had when neither the past nor the pointer is open to the possibility of reinscription because an artifact reveals little outside of a context or framework of understanding. Memories, as those fragments of the past that are temporally removed from their referents, rely on articulation and, reciprocally, reception, requiring an account of agency in both the past and present time frames. “History has a curious way of revising opinions,” admits the interviewer, challenging us, the viewer, to be conscious of the way history is represented through the documents that remain, and indeed, how this work is here standing in for the history of the Western Front.³

An attentive seer of history should emerge haunted by it, engaging in an unpredictable dialogue with brute facts. Living implies a vulnerability to time past and future, to play the role of conduit. Tom Sherman’s Individual Release (1978) might be a fictional story, but its tragic ending evokes a caught-in-the-throat realization. The characters Bill and Vivian to whom we are introduced at the beginning are revealed as dead by the end, cars crashing on a neverending freeway. The ghosts here are apparitions of the dead, themselves delivered via the lives that conceived them. Seeing these characters as ghosts requires a suspension of disbelief, or perhaps better stated, a surrendering to belief. Collapsing the binary between life and death, the characters, whose fate has already been given away (though all stories end in death), stand in with their flesh for ghost-flesh, speaking to living ears through the tongue of an artist.

Collective memory relies on articulation, on words and objects that can be passed between individuals and through time. The effects of memorialization can be observed in an individual when memory is held up against the whole of a life: more is lost than retained. “Memory is always transitory, notoriously unreliable, and haunted by forgetting–in short, human and social. As public memory it is subject to change: political, generational, individual. It cannot be stored forever,” but what does remain is often tied to stories told.⁴ It is noted that secrets stand here in opposition, as accounts of past actions that persist in a consciousness despite deliberate silence. But this refusal to speak of the secret is derivative of the desire to let die its content. A secret is never kept for posterity. Which is to say that the purpose of externalizing a history is to enliven it, to pass it as currency in an unpredictable pattern of transference.

So, how is it possible for ghosts, or history, to speak with the living? How can we communicate at all? Individual Release proposes translation. Sherman, the artist, lends himself as a medium, cloaking fictional facts in narrative, breathing life into death tales. Through a monologue, his audience is exposed to a dialogue between life and death, the artist accepting responsibility for the subject positions he has created and then reaching out through time and space to his audience. Creation is only ever or always an act of translation, inspiration passed through the sieve of motivation to yield an objectified synthesis. Similarly, meaning is produced in the interval between an object’s coming into being and subsequent encounters with it in the world. Because of this, the value of the creative intention to the reception of a document through time is wholly underdetermined. “The fault line between mythic past and real past is not always that easy to draw . . . the real can be mythologized just as the mythic may engender strong reality effects.” ⁵ Sherman’s desired effect depends heavily on our willingness to play into it. Surrendering to the work itself, it acts upon us. In turn, we revive Sherman’s ghosts in our own individual release, escaping weary and old identities.

Yet, ghosts need not imply reference to some antecedent being as a vestige of existence. Sherman hints at this by entrenching his artist character on the same plane as his artistic creations, but in the end his characters abandon the mortal aspect of their bodies and he goes on to celebrate 31 years of life. Using the medium of time, cinema can mark history. As a recording device, the mechanics of cinema also document the present. Dalibor Martinis, with his Dalibor Martinis Talks to Dalibor Martinis (1978), offers a compelling exploration of the way in which cinematic representation can collapse multiple temporal frames, allowing for a manifestation of our ghostly contemporaries.

Dalibor Martinis Talks to Dalibor Martinis is an interview where subject and interviewer are the same individual, separated by the 22 years between them. The ghost there, at the time of the conversation, was present but operating in a counterintuitive direction: for every question that Martinis asks in the year 1978, the image of a black screen holds the place for Martinis to insert his answer 22 years in future. Dalibor Martinis in the year 2000 was waiting to be realized, having not yet existed, or existing then as only potential energy, a being in the future tense. This ghost was much more than a current absence; this ghost was about becoming, and its voice was highlighted by drawing attention to the fact that it might one day be able to answer back. “This interview is very much related to time and our linear approach to time,” Martinis tells us, alluding to the continued conversation that is history, and our constant (re)writing of it.⁶ Emphasizing the tricky presuppositions inherent in the posing of questions, not to mention in developing answers to them, Dalibor Martinis Talks to Dalibor Martinis problematizes the notion of bracketed events. Diffusing his gaze through time and expressly interacting with the unknown between the artist as a young man and the artist as an aged man, Martinis submits to his past and future through instigating an intimate time capsule. History is permeable, inhabiting temporal spaces on into the future, back into the past, and often our language is inadequate to “describe phenomena which are by their nature ongoing, mutable.” ⁷ History is not frozen in time and this work acts as an accumulating duration offered to a public through exhibition, or to an artist by way of its own creation, as a testament begging for revision.

How can correspondence between evolving versions of an identity be established, as in the relationship that Martinis in the year 1978 holds to Martinis in the year 2000? How much can an event “change before it becomes a different thing: at what point on a sliding scale does the changeover occur? Where, in other words, are the grey areas in our taxonomy of the world, and what do those areas tell us about that taxonomy’s limitations?” ⁸ Kate Craig’s Delicate Issue (1979) shows us a ghost in the inevitable, mundane and tragic epigraph that awaits us as much as it has embraced her. A founding member of the Western Front, Craig initiated the Artist-in-Residence program responsible for the works comprising these ghost dialogues, herself instrumental in the production of them all. In July 2002, she passed away. Here we confront a visceral response to the aftermath of time’s passing. Her naked body, here presented in all of its excessive detail, has now aged and ended. As we read Craig’s identity off of her body, curiosity conversely compels us to acknowledge our own mortality. Her monologue asks us to take responsibility for contemplating every bit of her through a macro lens. Who are we to see her like this? She asks us, “How real do you want me to be?” and I have to ask back, how real is she, given this document, given her flesh, given our spying?⁹

Having passed outside of the privilege of present time, this future that Craig embodies now as a ghost is in stark contrast to the corporeality of Delicate Issue as a document of her flesh. There is an easy answer here to the question of classification, demarcating Craig’s physical and ghostly bodies by way of her passing from one into the other. However, there is also a more nuanced consideration, one of what gets brought forward and the component parts that are used in reformulations. Philosopher Jacques Derrida, commenting on his own interaction with cinema states:

The cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms . . . I believe that ghosts are part of the future. And that the modern technology of images like cinematography and telecommunications enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us. In fact, it’s because I wished to tempt the ghosts out that I agreed to appear in a film. It could perhaps offer both us and them the chance to evoke the ghosts.¹⁰

It is difficult to imagine Delicate Issue as not always being intended to evoke Craig’s ghost by way of her body, and it is most certainly impossible to not read it this way in the light of our hindsight. Given our assured finitude, this archive of her body boldly proclaims a moment in time that was already gone by way of its documentation as our acts of inscription necessarily trail behind the events they mean to entrench. Which is to say in response to the question of taxonomy, that Craig’s work conjures the grey areas, that ghosts inhabit the future through the now when we render the latter for the former.

Our relationship to time is cultivated through embodiment: we enter into collaboration with ghosts, past, present and future, in an act of translation to (re)write or (re)imagine the real. Carpi, Sherman, Martinis and Craig do not proffer their ghosts as privation. These ghosts reject a custom of forgetting by demanding a reckoning of corporeal existence by incorporation into the now. What materially remains is always inadequate to an event that has passed out of present time,¹¹ warranting this rejuvenating interconnectedness made possible by beings that do not rely on proper chronologies. Time, in all its tenses, is the connective tissue between these artists and myself, between history as it has been written, and here and now as we rewrite it. To work with an archive is to cut tangents of research through a collection that precedes and trails an individual existence. To articulate something new from the remnants of history is to admit that the past is not a closed and grounded system. And so, I speak with you from the other side of this action through these traces I am inscribing with the egotistical hope that they may be revivified by what I cannot here imagine.

I would like to begin this conversation by first positioning our location as artists, curators and audiences in residence at this centre founded to “create a space for the exploration and creation of new art forms,” ¹ which create new terrains for discourse and ultimately our experiences. Matthew Higgs writes that, “all exhibitions – whatever form they might take – are events, ultimately dependent on their relationship with an audience, with a lived experience.” ² As a guest curator, the question I pose is where does a space for creation reside for audience members?

Through intimate articulations of love, fragmentation, loss, reclamation and place, Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988), Hu Jie Ming’s Who? (1998) and Initiation Ritual/Sacred Bath (1991) from Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons provide answers to this inquiry. Their work situates us, the viewers, as active participants in shaping realities in opposition to the passive bystander by exposing our gaze.

A concept elaborated by Foucault, Lacan, and Diawara, the gaze has power at its centre. This power is insidious in that it creates a false neutral backdrop, one that is seen as objective and taken for granted. Filmmakers have often employed this power, using the objectivity of the camera as a distancing objective device to turn it on itself with subjective, closed in accounts. Laura Mulvey applied the idea of the gaze to cinema in her pivotal work Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, examining the male gaze upon the female subject.³ The gaze requires one to look and one to be looked upon. However, it is not merely a look or a glance but rather a device which can be used to empower and disempower. This gaze has been described by Okwui Enwezor as:

…Unforgiving. It operates below the surface and under the skin, even more so with all the scopic devices that clatter around all contemporary existence. From airport scanning machines, MRI scanners, Doppler tests, to conventional cameras, these instruments magnify the gaze, leading it into the deepest recesses of the body.⁴

Imagery encourages the gaze which in turn conjures meaning. How we define, interpret and ascribe meaning influences our imaginations. Our imaginations frame our possibilities and our limitations. The framework provided by our gaze has produced narratives which shape and inform our being and how we interpret and delineate our very existence.

During the time period when Measures of Distance, Who? and Initiation Ritual/Sacred Bath were created, many artists operated in a political artistic sphere concerned with social issues on a personal level. Canadian artists such as Kate Craig in Delicate Issue and Sara Diamond in Heroics, were producing videos exploring selfhood through “sexuality, race, the law, the family … presence of people and importance of verbal exchange.” ⁵ For these artists and others, the video has become a dominant mode of performance and communication. Occurring alongside several political and theoretical movements in Canada and abroad, the artists presented in this curatorial selection offer paths to decolonization through dismantling the gaze and providing avenues to re-author common denotations.

Traversing constructs of culture, language, time and place, Mona Hatoum entangles our gaze and quietly cultivates an emotive response, by connecting us to the vulnerabilities of her family affected by a war. Through her work Measures of Distance, Hatoum shares a collection of memories and thoughts expressed through letters she has exchanged with her mother during Hatoum’s period of exile. The video is a montage of superimposed still images of photographs and text that accompanies the voice of the narrator. Through sharing these correspondences, she transforms us from voyeurs to confidants as mother and daughter reveal secrets, desires and experiences.

The empathies that Hatoum establishes are achieved through the access points she carves using filmic techniques and non-linear narrative structure that interrupt what viewers often expect to see, hear and understand. Opening with the simple image of a paper with text and the beginning of a conversation, those not versed in Arabic must wait for the words to be translated for them. Similarly the photographs she uses are first presented as indistinguishable, extreme close-ups which give way to medium, then long shots revealing the body of a nude woman who we learn is her mother.

Hatoum seizes the opportunity to create a connection with the audience born out of a disconnection created after Hatoum’s father walks in on Hatoum taking photographs of her mother in the shower. Hatoum asks her mother permission to use the pictures which her mother allows with the condition that Hatoum doesn’t mention it to her father. This information grants us inclusion that the father doesn’t have. We become willing accomplices in this act of defiance, bound in secrecy to these two women.

Hatoum harnesses our gaze to destabilise the subject/observer relationship. She blurs what we see just long enough for us to concede our expectations to new meanings within the undefined. The distance she creates with her movement from extreme close-ups to long takes creates an interesting dynamic. The further away the camera moves from the pictures, the closer we are drawn to Hatoum’s experience. Although this movement is in opposition, our ability to identify the photographs mirrors our ability to identify with Hatoum and her mother. As a viewer, I was surprised, honoured and moved by the literal and metaphorical presence of nakedness. When the opening conversation began in a language I couldn’t understand, I wavered between feelings of curiosity and discomfort, wondering if I would be allowed entry or remain an interloper outside the boundaries.

Hu Jie Ming picks up this interrogation of gaze with Who?. Created as a multi-channel video installation, the work composites a series of left eyes, right eyes, noses and mouths. There is one channel per feature as well as a single channel assemblage and reassemblage of the face seamlessly amalgamated with parts from a variety of people. The features of the face ebb and flow throughout the video, vacillating between commonplace, comical and horrific from one creation to the next. As a performance and video artist, his work often uses repetition and fragmentation of images to hybridize and re-fuse popularized images into new and startling combinations.

Contrasting the clarification of images which Hatoum provides, Hu continually obfuscates his subjects and speaks directly to the audience, asking us simply, profoundly and boldly: Who? As a partner in this dialogue the audience is culpable in answering this question of identity. As he breaks down the signifiers of identity with his fluid manipulations of fragments, we as an audience are offered an opportunity to question our gaze and what informs it. These optical interruptions break the unrelenting stare in order to create a space for reinterpreting and recreating attempted impositions of the signs and signifiers shaping who he, she and we are.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons also engages with the construction of identity in Initiation Ritual/Sacred Bath. She draws upon depictions of the syncretic religious practices of Santeria, herself, landscape and migration to create her visually poetic anti-narrative for commentary.

The piece opens with Campos-Pons preparing a bath. She has gathered an assortment of plants and uses a pitcher of water and basin to wash parts of her body one at a time. Her face is concealed, in fact, her head is completely cut out of the frame. The scene of the bath is intercut with images of a landscape. Although, we are not privy to where the video is shot, images such as coconuts, flora, mountains and water provide clues to the location. The audience also sees cutaways to a woman’s feet traveling down a dirt road. These intercuts yield to juxtapositions of landscapes directly drawn onto the woman’s body. For example, the lines of her hand become the frame for mountains and water. Rows in fields become rows of braided hair. The images of cleansing that we have seen soon give way to images of white crosses on the bottom of her feet. Campos-Pons kneels as white angel-like figures circle her head performing a ceremony infused by colonization. However, it appears that elements have been appropriated to express something more complex and rooted in something altogether her own.

Though Initiation Ritual/Sacred Bath uses silence effectively, we hear a soundscape consisting of a blending of both electronic and the natural sounds of running water. Images are punctuated by proverbs from African philosophers as well as oppressive comments which have been directed towards her such as, “What luck the little nigger has. Who does she think she is?” ⁶

There is a familiarity present in her work that satisfies both the ethnographic and exoticising cravings of mainstream anthropological documents as well as attempts to dismantle colonial tropes.

That disturbance of your voyeuristic look enables the complexity and contradictions of your desire to see, to fix cultural difference in a containable, visible object, or as a fact of nature, when it can only be articulated in the uncertainty or undecidability that circulates through the processes of language and identification.⁷

Though the piece is abstract and surreal, as a woman of the African diaspora born in the Southeastern United States I can also relate to her experiences of dislocation from land, language, culture and identity. While the ceremonies of Santeria were not previously known to me, their essences find their way into the memories I have of my grandmother’s church. When Campos-Pons repeats the words of her lover “skin like black velvet,” ⁸ I also feel the sting of good intentions.

Hatoum, Hu and Campos-Pons each present visual narratives which they use to break apart, fuse together and distort the gaze, elucidating the looking processes which thread each person’s experience of the works. The superimpositions, non-linear narrative structure and visual revelations work together to create an understanding of the works that seek to mapone’s identity. The layers of images complicate and shake the foundations of fixed meanings and approach a more pluralistic portrayal of the self and desire than those previously informed by past and present colonial realities.

The site of rebuilding narratives and discursive mores which inform identity resides in the process of defining. Informed by our experience and knowledge, our views are varied and produce the gaze that creates the cartography of identity which we use to navigate understandings of one another.

Exploring the concept of the gaze offers an understanding of our perceptions and how they are authored. How we see ourselves, how we see others and how we believe we are seen is the filter through which all world views and consequently experiences are sifted.

What connects the experiences of Hatoum, Hu, Campos-Pons and myself as curator may be the injustice of the meta-narratives which follow us from place to place, marking us before we arrive. People are dislocated and relocated in relation to their identities and/or origins whether by choice or by force. However, in the space provided in the work of the artists, there are opportunities for reclaiming identities. In doing so, we illustrate that just as video is the medium of the artists in the media archive, the audience also participates in the medium where their perceptions serve as a space for creative forms of expression and social constructions. In this curatorial selection, the three artists work in conjunction to interrogate the construction of the gaze. Their illuminations are able to harness this construct to offer new possibilities. They offer ways to deconstruct, to read and reread meaning to enable us to recognize our agency in creating multiple narratives.