DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 1759 der Universität der Künste Berlin "Das Wissen der Künste"
With her photographic series Character Recognition (2006–2007) U.S.
artist Myra Greene examines historical constructions of race and racist
ways of looking from a perspective that undermines the assumed neutrality
of photography. She transforms the old ambrotype technique and encourages
to reflect on the power that visual technologies hold over the
representation of race and identity. Greene recalls yet disobeys
nineteenth-century ethnographic visual practices and looking
instructions, creating a technical and metaphorical deferral of the past
into the present and of the present into the past. Her photographic
practice unveils the ongoing violent effects of nineteenth-century
scientific racism on present-day bodies and embodied ways of looking. At
the same time, Character Recognition gives new life to the archives of
visual colonialism and experiments with photographic representation and
body memory as tools for decolonial options of non-normative (visual)
spaces.