Decolonial Feminist Praxis in 1980s Experimental Video Art 

Curatorial Essay by Roya Akbari

The original catalogue of In Visible Colours, published in 1989, positions women of colour at the intersection of race, class, and gender, as they “bear the burden and brutality of these triple forces of oppression, perpetuated by patriarchy and colonialism” (Jiwani 1989, n.p.). Decades later, as Zainub Verjee posits,

“[h]aving established the coherent narrative of IVC, it now becomes possible to open up new lines of inquiries into IVC and its legacy”
(Verjee 2019, 425).

For this educational guide to carry forward IVC’s legacy, we curated a program of films and videos from the original collection of IVC 1989 that employ a decolonial feminist framework, which is rooted in anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism. The selections all aim to challenge the violence of the settler-colonial state by generating dialogue on issues of gender, decoloniality, and Indigenous people’s rights.

These experimental works speak to each other across different places and temporalities—from Turtle Island (North America) to the Global South. Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988) addresses the themes of colonization, genocide, dispossession, and displacement in the context of Palestine. Ruby Truly’s …And the Word Was God (1987) focuses on the ongoing effects of colonisation across Canada. Shu Lea Cheang’s satirical Color Schemes (1989) functions as a critique of liberal multiculturalism in the United States. All of these works, therefore, act as feminist interventions that recount the ways in which settler-colonialism was and continues to be experienced by Indigenous, Palestinian, Black, and racialized diasporic bodies.

These works also account for the ways in which these communities have historically resisted the dominant cultures of their colonizers. Color Schemes, for instance, debunks the neoliberal assertion that colonization is a thing of the past, while …And the Word Was God similarly reflects on the brutality of assimilation as a violent settler-colonial project. Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance recounts the intimate correspondence between a mother and daughter, who were forced into a double exile: first, as result of the 1948 Nakba, the family was displaced from Palestine and relocated to Lebanon. Then, in 1975, while visiting London, Hatoum herself became exiled; war broke out in Lebanon, and she stayed in England.

 

In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy (2001) writes about the relationship between exile and the epistolary format: “[e]xile and epistolary are constitutively linked because both are driven by distance, separation, absence, and loss and by the desire to bridge the multiple gaps” (101). Images and letters both evoke the haunting presence of absence across time and space, across lands and generations, from periphery to metropole, diaspora to homeland, erasure to inscription. Naficy examines Hatoum’s Measures of Distance:

“The mother is visually inscribed by her still pictures in the nude and by her handwritten letters. […] The daughter, on the other hand, is visually erased from the film, but she is inscribed both by her voiceover and by being the subject of the letters address”
(Naficy 2001, 129).

The mother and daughter enact decolonial feminist resistance to multiple systems of erasure and violence—patriarchal and imperial—which threaten the autonomy and the existence of the mother’s body, which is not only metaphorical. The film’s multi-layered, fragmentary aesthetics foregrounds the mother-daughter’s embodied experiences between the personal and the political, between the private and the public, between the individual and the collective, between languages, between erasure and resistance.

Measures of Distance and …And The Word Was God both involve the performative reading of a text: an English translation of letters from the artist’s mother in the former, and a found poem in the latter. …And The Word Was God features the artist sitting at a desk, nude, reading a 1954 guide by Evangelical missionaries working in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. The document is a language course for the Cree-speaking people of the region—that way, they can hear the Gospel “in their own tongue.” Reflecting on cultural genocide, forced conversion, and the dispossession of the land of Indigenous peoples, specifically the Cree-speaking people of northern Saskatchewan and Turtle Island, the artist reads aloud a found poem called “Cree” which consists of simple sentences in English with basic verb conjugations.

As the video progresses, the sentences become increasingly violent, and the artist’s voice becomes agitated and emotional. The rhythm of the video speeds up, and images of the artist reading are blended/juxtaposed with images of a copy of the Holy Bible, a building with boarded-up windows, a snow-covered prairie, and a graveyard with simple crosses. The final image in the video is a flowing river. Ruby Truly’s emotional performative act of reading evokes the pain of colonisation and incites the viewer to bear witness to Indigenous peoples’ suffering; such is the ethical responsibility of the spectator. Like Hatoum, Truly’s practice is both decolonial and feminist and continues to speak to the ongoing effects of colonisation and genocide.

 

While …And The Word Was God is about the Canadian government’s policy of racial assimilation, which went hand-in-hand with missionary activity, Color Schemes is a satirical look at racial assimilation and the United States’ melting pot ideology. The video features African American, Asian American, Latino American, and Native American individuals “representing” their ethnicity and taking turns talking about their experiences of racism in the U.S.A. The video is divided into four sections which are based on laundry cycles: soak, wash, rinse, and extract. In each of the four sections, footage of people speaking is overlaid over—or framed within—industrial washing machines; the washing machine acting as a metaphor for the American “melting pot.” Interspersed with the laundromat scenes are scenes depicting the characters at a dinner table where they are served T.V. dinners, red wine, and are instructed about proper dining etiquette. At the end of the dinner, the characters reject the colonial dining etiquette and begin eating, drinking, and conversing in a way that is more natural to them as the classical piano music in the background is replaced by the sound of the drums. From questioning the idea of “representation” to talking about stereotypes, segregation, and labour conditions, Color Schemes exposes the lie of racial assimilation and denounces the hypocrisy of the melting pot model, as the film makes clear that the ruling class benefits from segregation and the exploitation of migrant labour and from keeping patriarchal, white supremacist systems in place.

If all of these works are now considered “archival,” the archive was already present in the films and videos included and suggested in this program. …And The Word Was God uses a 1954 religious document as its basis; Color Schemes is interlaced with footage from racist American cartoons, televised game shows, non-theatrical and educational films about America’s creation and expansion, black-and-white footage of a young Black boy dancing for the entertainment of upper-class white people. One film in our selection reflects on and mobilizes the archive of the Palestinian struggle. Nadia Yaqub (2023) describes the Palestinian archive

“as an image archive of steadfastness…An archive decades in the making, it is a repository not just of documentary images and reportage related to events, living conditions, relationships, and narratives but also haptic memories and structures of feeling from different Palestinian places and historical periods” (23).

In Hatoum’s Measures of Distance, the archive is personal; for example, while a conversation between Hatoum and her mother plays in the background, their written letters to each other are superimposed on blurred, grainy photographic images of the mother’s naked body in the shower, which the artist/daughter took during her last visit home. Over these photographs, the daughter reads a translated version of her mother’s letters. In this deeply layered work, the recorded conversation, the letters, and the photograph all function as memory tools—as archives. In a different film of Hatoum’s, Eyes Skinned (see additional archival materials), she repurposes media footage of the massacre of Palestinians in a refugee camp in Beirut in 1982. 

 

Also part of IVC 1989 was Alanis Obomsawin’s film Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986) (see additional archival materials), which narrates the events that led to the death of a young Métis boy, Richard Cardinal, who suffered abuse and neglect in the Canadian child welfare system. The story is told from interviews conducted with his brother, Charlie, and former foster families as well as mainstream news archives. Most importantly, however, the story also emerges from Richard himself: excerpts from his diary are narrated off- screen while photographs of Richard are shown to the viewer. Obomsawin’s film also uses dramatized footage of the young boy to narrate the story. Furthermore, the video reflects on the violence of the colonial archive and the generational trauma that results from forced relocation, separation, and the absence of familial transmission.

In conclusion, all of the curated video works repurpose and reimagine the archive while enacting decolonial feminist practices which reflect on the effects of colonialism, imperialism, and systemic violence on female, trans, queer, Black, Indigenous, and racialized bodies.

As Zainub Verjee herself notes:

“Given the urge to dissent, the homogenization of discourse, the erasures of selective memory registers, the neoliberal universities, the redeployment of the 1980s vocabulary with different import, a generation grapples with an erased past” (Verjee 2022).

These works continue to be relevant and need to be rewatched and reactivated by contemporary viewers. Thirty years later, it is high time that this erased past be reinscribed.


- Essay by Roya Akbari