TrAIN

Current PhD - TrAIN Student

Matthew Alexander Henson (centre) and other members of Robert E. Peary’s North Pole expedition, April 1909. Credit: Robert Peary—Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Contemporary Visual Representations of the Non-White Figure in the Arctic Landscape: British Colonial Constructions of the ‘Heart of Whiteness’ and the Black-White Binary as Fetish

In my investigation of the Arctic as a region which can be viewed as literally and symbolically ‘white,’ it is essential to realise, as Henry Morley states, that the Arctic was as much ideological as physical terrain, one on which Britons could stage debates about domestic and imperial identities, far from British and colonial shores. As such, the region existed as a morally ‘stainless’ landscape without the racial threats of slavery and miscegenation present in the traditional colonial and imperial encounter, the lack of an economic motive further reaffirming the ‘pureness’ of the British endeavours. If, as Morley asserts, the history of Arctic exploration should be understood as a “white” history about white Englishmen in a white space, then the non-white figure is an anomaly, eradicated or obscured from visual representations. However, as a recent review by Sukhdev Sandhu stated, there has been a small but noticeable trend for black artists – among them Isaac Julien in True North (2004) and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) in Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica (2009) – to mine the creative potential of spaces seen as literally and symbolically white.[British Film Institute; 2010]

Taking the BFI article as a catalyst, my doctoral research focuses on three specific artist film and video case studies - each from Black-British filmmakers, produced in the last ten years – that use the Arctic landscape as a space to discuss issues of race, memory and belonging. These works include John Akomfrah’s Mnemosyne; Grace Ndiritu’s Journey’s North: Pole to Pole and Issac Julien’s True North. Framed in the context of the colonial construction of the Arctic territory in the British Imagination, I aim to unearth the significance of the artist’s appropriation of Arctic space. I will pursue my research concurrently with my curatorial project Mother Tongue, bringing a practice – led approach to the PhD and employing a curatorial methodology.

mothertongue.se

Image Credit:

Matthew Alexander Henson (centre) and other members of Robert E. Peary’s North Pole expedition, April 1909.
Credit: Robert Peary—Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Links

• Website