Thesis abstract:

«p»Franz Fanon argued that decolonisation is by nature unknowable, he wrote “decolonisation, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder… that is to say it cannot be understood,…” (Fanon, 1961) However, over the last thirty years, decolonisation has undergone a cultural diachronic shift. Decolonisation is no longer an elusive historical process, nowadays it is popularly understood as a branded strategy employed by cultural institutions to chip away at their own colonial remnants. This shift has made possible a set of evasions on the part of colonial forces, or what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang term “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity and rescue a recognisable settler future. (Tuck & Yang, 2012) Making decolonisation accountable for providing a non-colonial tabula rasa is one such way we set it up to fail – decolonisation is not a process of settling, but unsettling. Many decolonial/anticolonial artists are combatting this bastardization of decolonisation in their work for cultural institutions, particularly when they are hired as part of formal decolonising strategies/contact zone programs, by focussing on personal ineffable impacts and understandings of colonialism within their own lives/bodies that cannot be reconciled. These artists pointedly resist being the means of a colonial transformation and ensure their struggle with colonialism persists by making work that operates on emotional, affective and spiritual planes, beyond material reality. These artists employ post-representation media, such as photography, moving image, VR and other digital technologies to create liminal interventions into colonial spaces that work to unsettle current paradigms while resisting being absorbed into a convenient colonial understanding of anti-colonialism.«/p»