T. J. Demos

In the wake of failed states, growing economic and political inequality, and the ongoing US- and NATO-led wars for resources, security, and economic dominance worldwide, contemporary artists are revisiting former European colonies, considering past injustices as they haunt the living yet remain repressed in European consciousness. With great timeliness, projects by Sven Augustijnen, Vincent Meessen, Zarina Bhimji, Renzo Martens, and Pieter Hugo have emerged during the fiftieth anniversary of independence for many African countries, inspiring a kind of “reverse migration”—a return to the postcolony, which drives an ethico-political as well as aesthetic set of imperatives: to learn to live with ghosts, and to do so more justly.

Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art

Return to the Postcolony

Laurence Favre

My analysis is attentive to the apparitions, the ghostly memories, the spectral figures, and the untimely presences that trouble and disturb those very declamations of historical truth and disavowals of the colonial present that make these artists attuned to what Meessen has termed a "colonial hauntology". As such, it is entirely appropriate that this investigation is conducted in the medium of the moving image, the privileged modern site -along with photography-where we witness "the great Frankenstein dream of the nineteenth century" wherein the dead appear to return to life.

If such a hauntological study necessarily proceeds by rejecting along with Stengers, Latour, and Gordon-the clear separations between modern science and premodern animism, objective positivism and subjective belief, the real and the imaginary, then it corresponds, in my view, to an innovative approach to aesthetics that joins the factual and the fictional. 

Again, the problem is not one of dealing with spirits from another world; rather, it's a matter of being sensitive to modernity's phantoms-that is, the disturbances and lingering presences, or presences of absence in the orders of visual appearance, through which current social formations manifest the symptomatic traces and uncanny signs of modernity's history of violence and exclusions.

It is precisely the negations, disavowals, and rejections of historical responsibility and present advantage, occurring in political discourse as much as in cultural representations, that allow and even cause the ghosts to fly free.

Return to the Postcolony Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art

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