Shown in “Africana: Recycling, Myth-making, Alterity” curated by Turf Projects @ Cutlog, New York, Usa, 2013

These are photographic postcards I bought from a collector of classical art from Africa he described as Tribal art. They are from the colonial time ranging from 1890s to 1940s. I felt an urge to give a new story line to these postcards by altering them, thereby reappropriating them and revealing an ‘apparition of the inapparent’ (Derrida) of ‘different moving perspectives’ (Achebe).

Like many of my generation and of European heritage I feel we inherited a colonial past I totally abhor and by morphing and transforming some of the image regime that mediated and even generated a reproduction of inequality, I was exorcising the ghosts of the past, discovering our own complicit position within the image system, while creating a new awareness. Through an aesthetic intervention and transformation of their captions I offer a different gaze, which I feel relates a diverse narrative that challenges the system of power in photographs and archival material.

Original Photographs with Applied Copper, Gold and Silver leaves, White and Luster Paints, Coloured Cotton Hand-Stitches