UNDOCUMENTED is a series of paintings of specific artifacts from the Victoria & Albert Museum collections, more specifically, objects whose records and provenance documentation are missing or incomplete. Displaced from various places of origin, these objects have been re-organized in Western institutions in ill-fitting categories without social & historical context. UNDOCUMENTED stylistically references the miniature …
Working Through the Aftereffects of Sykes Picot Balfour Et. Al (a work in progress, appropriately enough)
Created in conjunction with the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. Sneak peek here. ‘Earthenware’ is a a series of six short animations, each of which is inspired by a specific object in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s collections and archives. This project, as with much of my previous work, considers questions of collection and …
Unveiling/Invisibility Afterglow Signatories Burial/Excavation Orientalism Hair Lines
Migrations. Mixed media on cradled wood panel. I think about all those who have been displaced, dislocated, re-located, and misplaced. I think about all the routes they took to get to where they went, and how they got there and found a place that was entirely different than the one the map suggested. I think …
(click to view full size) One of the sites where the politics of inclusion/exclusion are felt most keenly is the border. It is there that all the intersections of race/class/gender/coloniality merge to a single, crucial instance, and through the omnipresent eye of surveillance, are reduced to a pass/fail system upon which survival can depend. To …
(click to view full size) This piece is a response to the exhibit Cairo Under Wraps, which displays a collection of delicate fabric sherds dating back several hundred years, which were collected by the ROM’s founder, C.T. Currelly, in the mid-nineteenth century . The exhibit boasts that the ROM is one of few world-class institutions …
(click to view full size) I first saw this painting at the AGO, at a 2009 exhibit of works by Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelites. I didn’t need to read its title to know that it was a painting of an Egyptian woman; even from across the room I felt a kind of recognition in it. …
signatories video hi res from Pansee Atta on Vimeo.(click to view full size) Who actually gets to own their own signature, to speak directly to their identity in this way? To get a name that’s yours, that you own, that contains your own history and the history of your kin? I don’t know if …
(click to view full size) The Orientalist artist depends on the bodies he depicts to remain static, placed precariously between the comfort of that which is familiar, yet thrilling in its difference. These harem girls might be “frightened”, but maybe the artist is frightened, too: maybe there is a threat lurking inside these “pretty little …