PROJECT STATEMENT
Rage Against the Archive is an artivist project comprising video, performance, and new media art that critically probes how the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) digital archives catalog, display and even sell dehumanizing ethnographic images from colonial India. This work scrutinizes whether institutional archives perpetuate the cycle of colonial exploitation, and how certain images can get decontextualized and lose their gravitas in contemporary networked image culture.
"The People of India," published between 1868-75, is one of the world's oldest and most comprehensive ethnographic books, commissioned by the British colonial government in India after the 1857 First War of Independence. After having experienced violent uprisings and the first challenge to their colonial rule, the British government was keen to understand the native tribes and their cultures to rule them better and prevent future rebellions. The camera, masquerading as an objective device, was employed as an imperial tool by the colonial government to document natives, “othering” them in this process. Dehumanizing ethnographic portraits were made with an agenda to push forward a pseudo-scientific theory about the racial, economic and cultural inferiority of Indians to justify colonialism.
How do these problematic images from the past exist in our contemporary institutional archives? For this project, I explored the online archives of NYPL, which has digitized the original ethnographic book, providing the public with free and open access to these images.
However, NYPL’s website also sells these images of suffering as Fine Art Prints in various options. This raises important questions about the aestheticization of someone’s suffering by a digital archive. In my screen-recorded browser videos, I use Google Chrome’s “Inspect Element” feature as a glitch resistance tool to alter the underlying HTML code of NYPL’s website, deleting problematic ethnographic photos and inserting texts in the website that resist the colonial ideology and the fixity of memory present in the archive. By activating these archival photos on NYPL’s site, I hope to restore some dignity to fellow Indian citizens, who have not only been exploited before by colonial photographers but whose visual representations are still being commodified today. As part of my Lecture-Performances, I talk about 19th-century ethnographic photography during the British Raj and address some ethical concerns related to viewing such images, divorced from their original context. I have also developed a Google Chrome browser extension that subverts NYPL’s website and replaces all the art print options with an error message in an act of Electronic civil disobedience.
I believe that digital archives, in some cases, instead of being harbingers of free knowledge, can be just another way to amplify the visual violation of some people, and they must be questioned. With my project, I use web technologies to challenge and disrupt entrenched power structures through digital disturbances. Rage Against the Archive proposes a decolonized archive where technology is harnessed to foster respect and digital care and asks important questions about how we, as a more conscientious society, should consume images made under duress online.
Installation Shot at ACM SIGGRAPH 2024, Denver, CO
INSTALLATION SHOTS
(From group exhibitions - 'Error:404' at :iidrr Gallery, Manhattan, NY, 'Seams and Strata' at Art Gallery of Peterborough, Canada and 'Out in the Margins' at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania)
Out in the Margins, group exhibition at Greenly Center Gallery in Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania
Juror's Choice Award by Will Wheeler in the 'Out in the Margins' exhibition
Lecture-Performance at The Photographers' Gallery, London on 13 May 2024 as part of 'Photography in Virtual Culture' conference
Web Browsing Lecture-Performance at the 'Digital Identities Over Time' online exhibition by Digital Good Network on 13 June 2024
Photo documentation of a Lecture-Performance and Live Website Intervention during a group exhibition at Common Space in Syracuse, NY on 28 April 2023
Photo documentation of a Lecture-Performance for Narratio Fellows at Syracuse University on 12 July 2023
