<p>Tammy Nguyen, <em>SOS: The Contact Zones Are Very Rich in Metasomatic Ores</em>, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.</p>
<p>Tammy Nguyen, <em>SOS: The Contact Zones Are Very Rich in Metasomatic Ores</em>, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.</p>

No. 39: Racialization and Politics of Visibility

Managing editors: Agata Pietrasik, Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ

Tammy Nguyen, SOS: The Contact Zones Are Very Rich in Metasomatic Ores, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.

This issue was supported by the SWPS University, Warsaw, University of Warsaw, Ministry of Science and Higher Education in the framework of the "Development of Academic Journals" program; project number RCN/SP/0698/2021/12, and the program of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from Culture Promotion Fund.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Racialization and the Politics of Visibility

    Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Agata Pietrasik
    Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Agata Pietrasik, ”Racialization and the Politics of Visibility”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2024/40-racialisation-and-politics-of-visibility/racialization-and-the-politics-of-visibility

    Introduction to the thematic issue: racialisation and the politics of visibility

    keywords: racialisation; politics of visibility; museum; visibility; decolonisation; body

Viewpoint

  1. Techno Witches

    Mihaela Drăgan (Kali), Nicoleta Ghiță
    Mihaela Drăgan (Kali), Nicoleta Ghiță, ”Techno Witches”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2024/40-racialisation-and-politics-of-visibility/roma-stars

    Presentation of Techno Witches – the first album of Romanian feminist trap, as well as instance of Roma Futurism.

    keywords: Roma Futurism; trap; feminism; performance

Close Up

  1. “For Even Though I Am Black as Soot, My Intentions Are Good” The Case of Zwarte Piet/Black Pete

    Gloria Wekker
    Gloria Wekker, ”“For Even Though I Am Black as Soot..."”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/2024/39-urasowienie-i-polityki-widzialnosci/bo-choc-czarna-jak-wegiel-mam-skore

    Polish translation of the fifth chapter of 2016 book White Innocence Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Wekker throws into light the controversies surrounding the folkloric tradition of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) in the Netherlands. The chapter unravels the dominant narrative in the Netherlands that portrays the country as a peaceful, tolerant, and non-racist society. It does so through the prism of the controversial celebration of the blackface character traditionally associated with the Dutch holiday of Sinterklaas. Wekker then goes to analyze the symbolically violent and affectively charged reactions that occur when this self-image of the Dutch society is challenged by racialized activists and international artists.

    keywords: whiteness; white innocence; Zwarte Piet; the Netherlands; imperial afterlives

  2. The Polyphony of Migrant Archives: The Curating and Art-making of “Our Journeys, Our Stories” (2022)

    Xuan Ma
    Xuan Ma, ”The Polyphony of Migrant Archive”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2024/40-racialisation-and-politics-of-visibility/the-polyphony-of-migrant-archive

    The article takes the exhibition “Our Journeys, Our Stories” as an example to investigate to which extent the curatorial and art practices can produce a synergy in reconfiguring migrant archives. Focusing on the exhibition’s critical engagement with official and counter archives, I analyze how it unveils the making of a racialized Chinese migrant history and retraces migrant resistance. On this basis, I turn to two commissioned artworks by Guan Wei (b. 1957) and Lindy Lee (b. 1957) to examine their dialogic relationship with the curatorial narrative. While the artworks are based on the same document on display, the former deconstructs the racializing mechanism embedded in the White Australian archiving system and the latter revitalizes migrant resilience. I claim that Guan adds institutional critique to the exhibition and Lee uses family history to enrich the curatorial concept of micro-history. The artists and curators stimulate the polyphony of migrant archives, which challenges the monolithic historiography of Chinese migration and enables a self-reflexive paradigm in curating archives and archive art.

    keywords: migrant archive; archive art; Chinese migration; White Australia policy; curatorial narrative; historiography

  3. Contesting the Colonial Archive, or Toward a Different Performativity of Images

    Birgit Eusterschulte
    Birgit Eusterschulte, ”Contesting the Colonial Archive”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2024/40-racialisation-and-politics-of-visibility/contesting-the-colonial-archive

    In order to intervene in dominant historical narratives and overcome Eurocentric perspectives, artistic historicizations often draw on materials and documents from archives. Photographic media in particular have been instrumentalized for the project of European colonialism since their development, and have thus fixed colonial and Eurocentric perspectives firmly in the archives. With the question of the politics of showing and not showing historical photographs, the article discusses artistic methods of dealing with a violent and traumatic past and confronting the viewer with the violence of history and the persistent effects of the “imperial shutter” (Ariëlla Azoulay). An underlying question of the essay is how artistic forms of historicization can become productive as methodical unlearning and intervene in the perceptions and self-understandings of a (Western) audience.

    keywords: colonial archive; photography; representation; epistemic violence; artistic historicizing; Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński; Nnenna Onuoha; Ariëlla Azoulay

  4. Making It Visible: On the Powers of Representation

    Thari Jungen, Friederike Nastold
    Thari Jungen, Friederike Nastold, ”Making It Visible”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2024/40-racialisation-and-politics-of-visibility/making-it-visible

    The article examines the relationship between in/visibility and political power from a queer-feminist, anti-racist, and intersectional perspective in art and visual culture. Our article focuses on the exhibitions Queer British Art 1861-1967 at the Tate Britain in London (2017) and Gastarbajteri at the Wien Museum, Vienna (2004). Looking at these exhibitions, we criticize established dichotomies within aesthetic-political discourses that rigidly distinguish between invisible powerlessness and powerful visibility. We propose to illuminate the volatile ambivalences of dominant, marginalizing logics of representation, to examine how making visible becomes a political act, thereby actualizing the concept of opacity.

    keywords: in/visibility; politics of representation; opacity; dis/identification; queer theory; art history

  5. Unveiling Racialized Imagery: Interwar Caricatures and Jewish Representation

    Aleksandra Guja
    Aleksandra Guja, ”Unveiling Racialized Imagery”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/2024/39-urasowienie-i-polityki-widzialnosci/imaginarium-rasy

    The article discusses the construction of racialized visual discourses concerning Jews as depicted in caricatures published in interwar satirical magazines. Its content reflected ethnic and cultural tensions in the multinational state that Poland was at the time. In cartoon humour, this was manifested, among other things, in the constitution of patterns of depicting national minorities by means of specific visual codes. The author, drawing on H. Pollin-Galay's ecology of witnessing, proposes an analysis of caricatures through the lens of an ecology of representation. This perspective can be delineated, in practical terms, into three categories: anti-Semitic, liberal-assimilated, and Yiddish. The article describes the characteristic codes of visual racialized discourse, including those that were captured by ideologically disparate groups and functioned in multiple ecologies. Visual scripts of blackness play an important role among them. In addition, patterns of autostereotyping and racialisation within and at the border of the Jewish milieu are discussed. A gender perspective is taken into account, with which the disproportion in the representation of Jewish women and men is indicated. The methodology used includes quantitative analysis using the auxiliary program MAXQDA and visual discourse analysis. The source material consists of selected annuals of interwar satirical magazines in Polish and Yiddish: Cyrulik Warszawski, Szpilki, Der Blofer, Der Mehabel and Szabeskurjer.

    keywords: racialized visual discourse; Jew; caricature; satirical magazine; Poland; ecology of witnessing

  6. On the Sidelines - in Plain Sight. Negotiating Roma Visibility

    Aleksandra Szczepan
    Aleksandra Szczepan, ”On the Sidelines - in Plain Sight”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/2024/39-urasowienie-i-polityki-widzialnosci/na-uboczu-na-widoku

    Starting with an analysis of artworks by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, the paper examines the modalities of Romani (in)visibility in the context of Holocaust commemoration and knowledge production. Using a case study of one video testimony: an interview with Romani survivor Krystyna Gil conducted by Michał Sobelman and recorded for the Fortunoff Archive on 13 May 1995, the article scrutinizes Romani invisibility in four aspects. Firstly, as a specificity of Romani Holocaust, which according to Gil herself happened and is happening “on the fringes:” regarding both the geography of the Romani dispersed Holocaust and its hard-negotiated presence in historical research. Secondly, in the context of presence of Roma in visual archives of the Holocaust, dominated by Jewish stories of survival. Thirdly, as a form of mimicry in majority society that for the wartime generation of Roma – and Jews – would always be a reverberation of the “good looks” from the times of the Holocaust. Finally the paper asks how to commemorate the Romani Holocaust so that it becomes visible – visible on Romani terms. English translation will follow.

    keywords: Romani Holocaust; video testimony; Gil Krystyna; commemoration of Romani Holocaust; dispersed Holocaust; Mirga-Tas Małgorzata

Perspectives

  1. Whoever Teaches Learns in the Act of Teaching; Whoever Learns Teaches in the Act of Learning

    Lưu Bích Ngọc
    Lưu Bích Ngọc , ”Whoever Teaches Learns in the Act of Teaching”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2024/40-racialisation-and-politics-of-visibility/whoever-teaches-learns-in-the-act-of-teaching

    This article explores various examples of migrant and post-migrant self-organized communities in Berlin, starting from the question of how they come up from the first place and the underlying need for self-organization. The examples of DAMN* (deutsche asiat*innen, make noise!) and un.thai.tled underscore a dearth of political-cultural participation avenues and the necessity for safer spaces to share experiences of racism. The article further looks into collective efforts to build libraries and archives by Each One Teach One (EOTO) e.V. and RomaniPhen e.V. The former is a community-based education and empowerment project for black, African, and African-diasporic individuals, while the later documents anti-racist and feminist Rom*nja movements. The author addresses the current funding challenges facing Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC) initiatives and organizations.

    keywords: immigrant community activism; knowledge production; knowledge mediation; self-organization; post-migrant; empowerment; anti-racism

  2. Artistic Tactics as the Construction of Agency

    Đặng Thùy Dương
    Đặng Thùy Dương, ”Artistic Tactics as the Construction of Agency”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/2024/39-urasowienie-i-polityki-widzialnosci/taktyka-artystyczna-jako-konstruowanie-sprawczosci

    The article traces the links between art and social action tactics. The reflection is formulated from the position of an artist of Vietnamese origin working in Poland. By locating her projects often in peripheral, that is, social or non-gallery spaces, the artist develops transnational connections other than the established ones. In this article, she discusses projects in which she presents the need to ground a modality of aesthetics that opens up possibilities for re-imagining ourselves as individuals and as a group. Focusing on these intangible aspects of art, the author shows how the construction of appropriate tactics lies at the heart of her artistic activities. In doing so, she touches on the boundaries of identity, causality, transculturalism, positivity and time.

    keywords: tactics; art; identity boundaries; agency; transnationality

  3. Voicing the Archive. Marysia Lewandowska in Conversation with Magdalena Ziółkowska on the absence of female representation in institutional histories

    Marysia Lewandowska, Magdalena Ziółkowska
    Marysia Lewandowska, Magdalena Ziółkowska, ”Voicing the Archive”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2024/40-racialisation-and-politics-of-visibility/rozmowa

    Conversation between artist Marysia Lewandowska and curator Magdalena Ziółkowska, revisiting Lewandowska's early practice and formative years in London, including the Women Audio Archive, as well as archival several projects devoted to recontextualization and displacements of institutional practices and narratives, and the most current installation and performance Welcome (2023), commissioned by Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover.

    keywords: archive; women artists; institutional critique; voice; Marysia Lewandowska

  4. Black Perspectives on Polishness. Oliwia Bosomtwe in Conversation with Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ and Agata Pietrasik.

    Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Agata Pietrasik, Oliwia Bosomtwe
    Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Agata Pietrasik et al., ”Black Perspectives on Polishness”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/2024/39-urasowienie-i-polityki-widzialnosci/czarne-perspektywy-polskosci

    A conversation with Oliwia Bosomtwe around her book Jak biały człowiek. Opowieść o Polakach i Innych [Like a White Man. A story about Poles and Others].

    keywords: blackness; polishness; colonialism; history

Snapshots

  1. Staying with the Difficulty, Struggling for Connectivity

    Katarzyna Bojarska
    Katarzyna Bojarska, ”Staying with the Difficulty”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2024/40-racialisation-and-politics-of-visibility/staying-with-the-difficulty

    The author discusses curatorial research project Communicating Difficult Pasts 2018-2024 by Margaret Tali and Ieva Astahovska with specific focus on the final exhibition in Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds at the Tallinn Art Hall, Lasnamäe Pavilion (August–October 2024)

    keywords: memory; trauma; art; museum; exhibition; Baltic region

  2. Humanities and the global and planetary crisis. Dipesh Chakrabarty's post-anthropocentric proposal

    Bartłomiej Brzozowski
    Bartłomiej Brzozowski, ”Humanities and the global and planetary crisis”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 39 (2024), https://www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/2024/39-urasowienie-i-polityki-widzialnosci/humanistyka-a-kryzys-globalny-i-planetarny

    Krytyczna refleksja nad wydanym w jęzku polskim pod redakcją Ewy Domańskiej i Małgorzaty Sugiery zbiorem pism badacza zatytułowanych Humanistyka w czasach antropocenu, red. E. Domańska, M. Sugiera (2023).

    keywords: humanistyka; Dipesh Chakrabarty; modernizacja; antropocen