Seeing Through, Seeing With
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,”
states the nameless black narrator in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, who recounts his struggle for agency and acknowledgement in the highly racialized United States. “When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”[1] He relates his story from the basement of the whites-only building where he lives clandestinely, hidden from view but insistently present, embodying the buried conscience of those living above him. He reminds us that invisibility is not a fixed state of being, but rather a condition actively and systemically imposed on those considered “Other.” The unseen is thus not something (or someone) we cannot see, but rather something (or someone) we refuse to see, look through, reimagine, ignore, and forget.
The cultural production of the “Other” depends heavily on representational practices that transform subjects into images or texts. This process is never neutral. The same structures of power that operate in society are frequently reproduced and reinforced in the media, whether consciously or unconsciously. It is not only a question of who is represented and how, but also by whom. Judith Butler acknowledges this when she reminds us “to consider what forms of social and state power are ‘embedded’ in the frame.”[2] Butler’s argument could be extended beyond photography’s physical frame to many forms of representational media, including video and computer-generated imagery.
Visual media possesses a powerful ability to create subjects and define norms, a fact recognized by many lens-based artists working in cultural climates where conversations about representation and identity have become central to public discourse. The exhibition Out of Sight: Picturing the Unseen highlights new work by four emerging interdisciplinary artists who question and explore the fraught relationship between visibility and the construction of “Otherness.” They approach the unseen as a process—an “unseeing”—in which certain groups of people are systematically erased, silenced, sidelined, and recreated according to the needs of a dominant culture. They ask who remains unseen, particularly in the West, and how privilege directly influences one’s access to tools of self-representation.
In their work, “out of sight” becomes both a social position and a place. Cihad Caner and Róisín White critically examine how “Othered” subjects have been routinely erased and reimagined as monsters and fairy changelings—invisible threats that serve to dehumanize individuals deemed different by the societies in which they live. Sinead Kennedy reveals how migrant detention centers are purposely concealed and difficult to access, while Agata Wieczorek approaches the factory as a site of unseen, gendered labor. The exhibition’s subtitle “picturing the unseen” likewise carries multiple meanings, as it refers to “picturing” in the sense of both imagining and image making, each of which has lasting social and political effects. Through photographic and video works, the included artists show us how visibility is continually negotiated through discourse, folklore, governmental policies, and the production and consumption of goods. They mine local histories, draw from critical theory, and engage with diverse communities in order to examine how marginalization operates and persists. Their subjects’ bodies emerge as sites where visibility can no longer be denied or suppressed. They show us that “unseeing” is not only a reductive act of erasure but is also productive, leading to the creation of myths, narratives, alternative communities, different temporalities, and physical structures of confinement and survival.
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For his work Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster, Cihad Caner used motion capture technology to create computer-generated animated monsters, who speak and sing to each other in a two-channel video installation. He made the work in response to the mainstream media’s persistent characterization of those considered “Other” as “monstrous.” Interested in language’s subject-producing power, he traced the etymology of the word “monster” and found that the Latin verb—monstro—means to demonstrate, while its noun—monstrum—refers to a divine omen or warning. The word thus possesses a deeply rooted connection to practices of signification, and so it seems apt that the monster has proven such an enduring and meaningful symbol across different cultures. An object of fantasy, the monster is understood and produced through the fear of that which is unknown and originates from outside. “Monsters provoke us to break down our built-in categories and rethink,” states one of Caner’s unnamed beasts.[3] They are the aliens that dispute the unalienable. Because they can never be seen, their bodies remain immaterial, horrifyingly boundless and unfixed.
Perhaps this is why the physicality of Caner’s monsters is so striking and, at times, humorous. Scarred and pockmarked, with sagging, wrinkled skin, they seem strangely human, which essentially they are. The artist created them by digitally recording the movement and expressions of performers—including himself—which he then animated. By using motion capture, Caner effectively preserves the indexical; beneath the layers of computer-generated imagery are actual human faces, forcing us to question the many ways that multidimensional subjects are reduced to caricatures. The artist is specifically interested in exploring the experience of inhabiting migrant, female, and queer bodies, and the three performers thus identify with these groups. Caner draws from his own experiences as a Turkish national living in the Netherlands, where the sizeable Turkish community is frequently targeted by right-wing politicians and subjected to microaggressions on a daily basis. Through his monsters, Caner critically reflects on how stereotypes are generated, and is particularly interested in their relation to image and text production, as he points out that the word “stereotype” originally referred to the metal plate used to make prints.
Caner’s work also considers the exclusionary potential of language, particularly for those who are non-native speakers. He draws from Jacques Derrida’s writings on hospitality, in which the author argues that the foreigner’s obligation to communicate in a language that is not their own represents “the first act of violence” against them.[4] This could be a reason Caner’s monsters frequently sing; in song—which is considered by many to be the most primeval and embodied form of speech—universal sounds often take precedence over specific words. The artist further engages with linguistic systems in his collection of clay tablets imprinted with self-created symbols comprising a fictional language of signifiers without signifieds. According to Stuart Hall, “stereotyping…is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order,” to which language certainly contributes.[5] With his hieroglyphs, Caner presents an alternative semantic order open to new possibilities for meaning making, unburdened from the baggage of conventions and implicit hierarchies.
Unseen creatures are also a central focus of Róisín White’s photographic series Cross the Child’s Palm with Silver. For this body of work, the artist conducted in-depth research at the Irish National Folklore Archive, where she discovered a trove of stories about changelings, creatures believed to have been left in place of humans who were stolen by fairies. However, it eventually became clear that those most often suspected of being changelings were children with disabilities. Already in 1911 the anthropologist Walter Wentz-Evans conducted a study of living children labeled changelings and discovered that many were so accused “merely because of some bodily deformity or because of some abnormal mental or pathological characteristics capable of an ordinary rational explanation.”[6] He noted that such children were often “the objects of systematic cruelty,” and “cures” said to return the “healthy” child to their rightful place included subjecting the suspected changeling to beatings, burnings, exposure, poison, and drowning.[7] Adults too were sometimes charged with being changelings, especially those who had mental illnesses or flouted the expectations of a patriarchal society. In certain cases, the changeling myth may have been used to justify mistreatment and even murder, as in the sensational 1895 case surrounding the death of Bridget Cleary, whose killers were convicted only of manslaughter as the judge was convinced they truly believed she was a fairy imposter.
In her installation White mixes original and archival images, resulting in a blurring of fact and fiction that has an unsettling effect. Her experiments with scale encourage us to continually adjust our proximity to the work, and our gaze thus oscillates between one of intimacy and distance. The archival photos often feature noticeable halftone, drawing attention to the images’ histories of reproduction and distribution in home medical guides and textbooks. Though the “rational explanations” of the medical community gradually displaced fantasy and superstition, White’s work reminds us that photos produced as part of studies and experiments have their own legacy of “Othering” and inflicting violence on those who did not conform to scientific definitions of “normalcy.”
In her work, White reveals how the changeling’s body became a potential threat to social order and a site for confronting and negotiating difference. Because a person with disabilities or mental illness could indisputably claim membership to a community by virtue of being born into it, the changeling myth became a way to effectively transform them into something originating from outside, an infiltrator stripped of their humanity. Fear of the endemic “Other” was expressed in countless superstitious practices, which White details in her work, from hanging iron above the cradles of newborns to warning the fairies that their homes were aflame in order to trick them into fleeing. Belief in the power of the fairies also impressed itself onto the landscape, as White shows us in her photos of rings of clover and trees believed to belong to “the good folk,” which were—and still sometimes are—protected from destruction in order not to anger them. Through her exploration of the changeling myth, the artist reveals how local beliefs have contributed to national history and shaped Irish identity, determining which subjects are denied a place in the larger society.
Sinead Kennedy’s photographic and video work likewise considers how national belonging is defined through exclusionary practices. In treading waters, she relays the experiences of a group of refugees she befriended over the course of three years, after meeting them while visiting the Broadmeadows Detention Centre in her hometown of Melbourne.