The World Builders
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Peters, John
Abstract
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British colonial administrators, foresters, and land surveyors partitioned and settled land and cataloged and exploited natural resources. In the present, contemporary artists have appropriated these colonial practices by taking on the role of engineers, botanists, soil scientists, and archivists. They move soil, plant trees, evaporate seas, photograph oil, and collect seeds in their artwork. This dissertation combines archival research with feminist, postcolonial analyses of videos, photographs, and performances created by the Otolith Group, Heba Y. Amin, Ursula Biemann, Warren Cariou, Rebecca Belmore, and Larissa Sansour to study how artists retool colonial techniques of land management to ameliorate the contemporary climate crisis. I argue that by adapting the language and tools of colonialism these artists propose alternatives to industrial capitalism, colonial exploitation, and ecological destruction. I further argue that by building differently with our material, cultural, and political inheritance, they find hope and sustenance in an environment that has historically subjugated them. Their artworks are a key site for thinking about how to live in the world in the wake of colonialism and climate change. I describe these artists as “world builders” because they treat the world as physical matter to reshape, and because they attempt to displace and replace colonial representations of the world with anticolonial ones. In chapter 1, I look at writings by Rabindranath Tagore and artworks by Nandalal Bose, Uma Sen, and the Otolith Group to rethink the practice of terraforming. For these artists terraforming is not a tactic of settler colonialism but a way to heal the damage of deforestation and to reorganize the geography, politics, and culture of colonial and postcolonial India. Chapter 2 is about rebuilding the world by building infrastructure. I focus on a video and performance work by Heba Amin, in which the artist pretends to be a politician who wants to drain the Mediterranean Sea by constructing hydroelectric dams. Reading her work alongside theories of performance and infrastructural media, I show that Amin’s images, speeches, and gestures bring about infrastructural change, though not in the way we might expect. Chapter 3 focuses on the role of the aerial survey photograph in developing the Alberta oil sands and the contemporary artists who adopt the aerial view to document ecological damage. I contrast Ursula Biemann’s aerial photographs with Warren Cariou’s aerial “petrographs,” photographs made from oil, and Rebecca Belmore’s wooden megaphone to demonstrate that it is possible to challenge the aerial survey’s extractivist techniques by cultivating collaborative and familial relations with oil. Finally, chapter 4 turns to seed libraries. I analyze a video about seed keeping by Larissa Sansour and two historical botanical archives to think about how, in seeds, historical and cultural continuity persist alongside difference and transformation. Taken together, these artists help answer the questions: What kind of world do we want to struggle for? How do we build it? Their visions for the environment and for communities held together by hope and love are urgently needed.
Recommended Citation
Sen, Pooja Priti, "The World Builders" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1382.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1382
