The artist as witness: a colony under gaze

The thesis examines what it means to bear witness through art. The complexity of bearing witness is discussed with reference to the writing of Giorgio Agamben and Georges Didi-Huberman, and the artwork of Broombeg and Channerin, Artur Zmejewski and Bindi Cole. My own lens-based practice offers a method of witnessing events at a temporal remove. Specifically, I focus my gaze on colonialism in my birthplace of South Africa. My photographic series Books on a White Background and the video The Miners Companion use the colonial archive as a pivot to critique western constructs of knowledge, whiteness, colonial and imperial histories.