Lee Mackinnon (Senior LecturerBA (Hons) Photography at London College of Communication, UAL) and Peter Ainsworth (Co-course Leader BA (Hons) Photography at London College of Communication, UAL)听
The past four months have seen students across the globe driven into lockdown, separated from classrooms. The last two months have seen global reactions to the murder of George Floyd, and protests against the sustained violence of colonial legacies. From the total atomisation of global communities, we have since witnessed a renewed call to action: to think and create together. An urgency has been defined and is reflected in the work of this year鈥檚 graduating students of photography: works dealing with substantive concerns of the present are not simply rhetorical devices, but agents of change and speculation. The turbulence of our time is addressed in the presence of precarity, whether in finance, environment, or understanding the global 鈥渘etizen.鈥
Anjali Gupta questions the biopolitical conditions of pandemic, particularly that lockdown has听disproportionatelyaffected those living in poverty.听Closed doors (2020) evokes neoliberal society withdrawing care from vulnerable citizens. Her project reads the emptiness of south London鈥檚 streets through extracted interviews conducted by ATD Fourth World, a human-rights, anti-poverty organisation. An exploration of 鈥渢he hidden stories and lives of people going through the pandemic, who have been pushed to the margins of society.鈥
贵辞谤听Byorei Sung, 鈥減recarious labour is an unsteady one, with fears that even if [he] is now in the workforce [he] may be driven back to the periphery of the labour market.鈥 (2020) Is the artist鈥檚 labour a form of work? Whose work do we name and value? In practice, the function of commerce is turned into a means of artistic production as she inverts the gesture of giving a receipt into the process of her practice.
Xiaomeng Cheng states that by resisting the master鈥檚 discourse the body too can escape 鈥渢he status of being the object which only exists to be desired and consumed.鈥 Cheng highlights European discourses that consign Asian women to dutiful workers, whose only recourse to escape is the 鈥渨hite knight鈥 of European fiction. She skilfully traces these archetypes through the novel Madame Chrysanth猫me (Puccini鈥檚Madame Butterfly), to the high-tech orientalism of latter-day fiction.
Dismantling hegemonic power has been a major theme in the work of this year鈥s Photography graduates.听Isha McCulloch recalls walking through emancipation park in Kingston Jamaica: 鈥淚 see sculpture of a man and a woman facing each other emerging out of the ground. They are black. They are cast in black. They are imposing. They stand proud. They are grand. I quietly compare the black man to Trafalgar听Square鈥s Nelson.鈥 This quiet comparison indicates the gathering of global outrage that would rain down after the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minnesota some five months later. In practice, McCulloch defines a sense of place by understanding ritual and the genealogy of objects. 鈥淭here is something very powerful about being able to walk through where my ancestors may have been sold. To look up and enter the same houses that were forbidden.鈥
Processes of surveillance capital and data become the subject of听Zahraa Karim鈥檚 work, exploring digital visibility. Her engagement with open source facial recognition software is frustrated: the machine is unable to听seeher. Karim wishes to create an ethical data set where agency becomes a form of digital activism, 鈥渙ffering visibility and agency to participants, my practice begins the conversation by posing a question, rather than an answer鈥 step towards equity and justice in the use of AI.鈥
Critiques of Empire persist in themes of erosion and extinction.听Phoebe Somerfield听is clear that the geological epoch of the Anthropocene cannot be conquered by the European gaze or assuming the master鈥檚 discourse. We must rather 鈥渄elve into the sludge.鈥 It is perhaps 鈥渢he sludge鈥 of capitalism that will tell the future most about how we lived, not the grandiose fossils we imagine in vitrines. In practice, Somerfield thinks听withthe landscape through performance, highlighting an eco-feminist viewership.听
Sludge becomes clay, forming听Wojciech Fec鈥檚 brick 鈥撯 a measure of the Empire鈥檚 expansion: 鈥渇ormed by hand from mud or clay a brick takes the form of an approximated cuboid, traditionally with a ratio of 4:1; the archetypal bricks dimensions are predetermined by the shape of the human hand鈥 (2020). The built world can be seen as prosthetic to the human body. This referent is evident in Fec鈥檚 practice where remnants of computation queer dimensionality, reclaiming 鈥渢he queer spatial experience; the gay face, the sissy walk, voguing. Queer architectural practice and urbanism. Grindr equating kinship with physical proximity, ordering potential partners based on their geographic coordinates. Sexual dimorphism disappears in the fourth dimension.鈥 Experimental reclamation where the photographic process becomes metonymic 鈥 the glitch celebrated and monumentalised through algorithmic digital process.听
Arianna Poverini鈥檚 concept of post human entanglement, read through the lens of Karan Barad, manifests in the installation,听Heavenly Bodies / Your Eyelashes On-fire / Fabric of the Spacetime听(2020). Here, Poverini explores the boundaries of the human, relational to quantum understandings of space-time. A poetic interplay of images infinitely reflected in the speculative exhibition space. As she states: 鈥淚f it is all connected at a subatomic level, everything is forever existing everywhere.鈥澨Descriptions of the universe made from the perspective of an observer are inevitably situated in particular sets of knowledge and we cannot look at phenomenon in its entirety. She terms this position as 鈥渙bservers from within.鈥 And in this capacity states that we 鈥渘eed to embrace that matter and meaning are not two separate entities which coexist; they are components of a whole, and they cannot be parted.鈥
As academics, we have a privileged view into the future of human creativity and thought through the intellectual and practical work of students. The snapshot presented here is by no means definitive or complete; but is a substantive document of the conditions in which we are submerged, or about to enter. Students show us the shape of the future and the limits of our own knowledge. Only by following them beyond these limits, can we continue to contribute to conversations about how that future might take place.听
Credits:
, On Fairly Solid Ground, 2020
2. , Heavenly Bodies / Your Eyelashes On-fire / Fabric of the Spacetime, 2020
3. , Midas, 2020
4. Byorei Sung, Receipt for Life, 2020
5. , On Fairly Solid Ground, 2020
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