Re-Photography and Bricolage

Catalog description

This course investigates the practice of re-photography as a critical and creative method for reimagining personal, collective, and diasporic archives. Bringing together diverse concepts of bricolage and postcolonial theory, students will explore how artists employ fragmentary and contemporaneous frameworks to challenge hegemonic narratives of Western-colonial history. Through an interdisciplinary approach that bridges photography, sculpture, and film, this class will consider how materiality, authorship, and temporality intersect within diasporic cultural production to resist the imposed order of the colonial matrix of power. Students will engage with the works and methodologies of contemporary artists such as Sarah Sze, Andina Marie, Bahar Enshaeian, Dawit Petros, Eve Tagny, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, Karice Mitchell, Luther Konadu, Olukemi Lijadu, Sandra Brewster, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Zinnia Naqvi, Zun Lee, Ernesto Cabral de Luna, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Oghobase Abraham, Alana Fields, and Abass Kelani, among others. In addition to critical readings and discussions, students will experiment with material languaging and interdisciplinary modes of making, utilizing the Print Lab and Wood Shop to realize their own projects. The course will culminate in a public exhibition at McMurtry, where students will present works that probe the sculptural and filmic potentials of photography as a medium of remembrance, resistance, and futurity.