The imperial shutter and the black body

By Lisa Andrine Bernhoft-Sjødin, ArtConstructs

There’s a quote from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, in which she discusses ways of unlearning imperialism in Potential History (Verso, 2019):

Thinking about imperial violence in terms of a camera shutter means grasping its particular brevity and spectrum of its rapidity. It means understanding how this brief operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into a refugee, a looted object into a work of art, a whole shared world into a thing of the past, and the past itself into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart form both present and future.

Nicole Rafiki’s work describes a future by contesting image gestures of the past, gestures employed and framed by an imperial force through colonialism, the force of which we still see today. The photographs displayed in Ascension contests the imperial shutter Azoulay describes and the framing of blackness, selfhood and emigration with a acutely black femme gaze. They are acutely personal, and narrates the artist’s own mental states when trying to make sense of the delicate complexities of unlearning imperialist structures from within the heart of a woman finding her way home through photography, textiles and social relational gatherings.

When talking about her work during the last three months working on this exhibition, she told me of the tremendous emotional release her practice is to her, and how she tackles the emotional labor of coming to terms with war trauma, emigration and having to negotiate between the country she grew up in and the one she fled at a young age. Her photography is an act of growth and self-determination, that does not have to require negotiating gazes and gestures that isn’t hers.

How do you find your way home, when none of the places you are scripted to turns out to be the Utopia you dreamed of. In an environment that seeks to control and surveil the black body as a foreign element. How does one find peace in this ambivalent and rootless state?

A repeating feature in her portraits is the textiles and paint that obscure or hides the faces of her subjects. This is an act of defiance and a nod to her Congolese culture. It’s a comment on how we highlight the eyes to create familiar responses, in that we can read a narrative of an image and the subject within it. By obscuring the eyes, even though the perspective invites direct contact with the subject, the viewer has to look for familiarity in other features of the image, launching them into unfamiliar ground, and thus other gestures.

The subjects releases themselves from the imperial gaze, to find a space of self expression. They force the narrative back into the frame of the images and expand the shutter gaze, and work from within to take ownership of they’re own complexities. They don’t feel like sharing, in a world that has onsidedly shared them for so long.

Rafiki’s work is moving past the imperial shutter, and into the void of a present and a future.