Postcolonial Postscript: Restaging and Repurposing the Colonial Archive
Alexander Supartono, Edinburgh Napier University
By their very nature colonial archives have historically been physically and ideologically centralised and exclusive. Their collection endeavour in the 19th and early 20th centuries was neither innocent, nor politically neutral. The “archival impulse” of the 1990s that questioned the archive as an entity and institution and which saw archival material repurposed by artists on the museum wall gained renewed momentum with the advent of digital technologies and the Internet, the uber-archive of readymade content. With digital proxies now accessible to much wider and geographically disperse audiences, new avenues and channels appear for the critical and creative interrogation of the colonial archive, its ontology, politics and power.
This paper aims to examine how digitisation project of photographic material from colonies has allowed new readings of the colonial archive and how it has influenced the work of contemporary artists in the former colonised countries. The discussion will start by an examination of the advantages as well as limitations of digitisation in terms of documenting the physicality, biography and narrative of the photographic material as insignia of colonial practice and how these may impact on post-colonial narratives. After a brief overview of appropriation strategies employed by Southeast Asian artists working on colonial photographic material, the paper will focus on the ongoing project of Indonesian photographer Agan Harahap, Mardjiker Photo Studio (2015). Operates within the archive’s mnemonic function by using the language of appropriation and parody, Mardjiker Photo Studio specialised in the inter-mixed portraits: westerners wear and pose like the locals and vice versa. Harahap regularly disseminates works of the Mardjiker’s Studio in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter under the name of Sejarah_X. The audiences’ participation in sharing and commenting hints at the endless realm of possibilities for how these series may be circulated, recontextualised and rematerialised. The “post-production” phase of these series highlights the audiences’ secondary manipulation in their participatory process, which fuels to the series’ complicated nature of originality and authorship.
In this paper I will explore how the online presence of colonial material and its postcolonial appropriation as well as the possibilities for user interactivity and repurposing of content has opened new channels and networks for the critical examination of the colonial archive as part of the expanded post-colonial archive.
Last updated: 30 January 2017
