The Work of Contemporary Art and Commemoration: Reading Ali Kazimi’s Fair Play (2014)
- In response to this issue’s call to “engage aesthetic processes of
remembering,” this paper analyses Fair Play (2014), a stereoscopic 3-D
cinema installation by Toronto-based filmmaker Ali Kazimi. Produced in
conjunction with the centennial anniversary of the arrival and detainment
of the Komagata Maru steamship in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,
the installation engages in an act of critical commemoration by imagining
the lives of members of the South Asian diaspora affected by this
incident. I argue that by centering affect within the formal and
conceptual framework of the installation, Kazimi produces a decolonial
aesthetic that restructures our relationship to this past, bringing to
the fore ways of living and knowing that had previously been devalued and
violently erased by colonial agendas and neoliberal art historical
critiques.