Karno Dasgupta argues against reparative historiographies, and ruminates on “the look of love” through Sim Chi Yin's photography.

Part of What Time Tells, an ongoing series on time and the problems we face today. Published in conjunction with Countering Time, AAA’s exhibition about archival time and the idea of afterlives.

I: Unseeing Things

[B]ut later I think that the idea of irrefutable history matters less than the importance I give it. What might equally count is a shared pact between [us] to believe. Or that history is conditional upon what we need to believe, so that we can believe in each other.

—Al-An deSouza¹

The memory of Shen Huansheng infuses what is to follow, so I begin with the facts of his death. Detained in British Malaya in 1948, a school principal and newspaper editor, having been taken mid-year in the western state of Perak, he was deported to southern China in early 1949 and executed in the autumn of that year, in the mountains of Guangdong.² Shen was a leftist during the Malayan Emergency. He was one of 30,000 suspected communists removed from the peninsular colony over a twelve-year period, as part of Britain’s counterinsurgency against the National Liberation Army.³ His physical disappearance began the day colonial officers entered his store and put him in handcuffs before his two sons. They marched him off, exiting the building and, over the ensuing months, the lives of his family. He died a Chinese Communist Party cadre, near his ancestral village, at the hands of a retreating Kuomintang. That news took many, many months to come home. Shen’s body never did.⁴

For the next sixty years, neither his wife nor his five children spoke of the man.⁵ He was set aside in an economy of managed silence. Sim Chi Yin, the artist, was born three decades into this family pact. Heir to a grandfather twice-disappeared, in body and story, she could not help but wonder what Shen was like and why she could not know. In time, she sought to soften the hard habits of her family’s held tongues, to persuade the memories to return, and guide a recovery of their kinship. First, Sim questioned her family and, then, Shen’s contemporaries, garnering the coordinates of his absence. Once informed, she plunged into a retracement of the infamous “deportation trail” where many thousands of locals were pushed out of Malaya. Through jungles and mountains, rivers and lakes, sites of battle, encampment, and colonial atrocity, Sim stalked history to the doors of their origin, a “village and house,”⁶ ravenous for a sense, any sense, of who Shen was. Or, barring that, what he might have been like on that trail, newly shared, all those years ago.

Sim’s overarching project is entitled One Day We’ll Understand. Begun in 2015, the name scaffolds a mix of archival, documentary, and speculative interventions, including a lens-based series, a practice-driven doctoral degree, and a multimedia performance.⁷ Across mediums, Shen’s story remains the personal keystone for Sim’s structural engagement with the past—its violence and imperfection, uneven record and forgetting. As an accumulating body of work, it attunes an audience to the afterlives of what has been, whether this influence is subliminal or manifest in their experience of the present. One Day We’ll Understand also attends to the vast deserts of detail between generations, where we remain cut off from intimate knowledge of our forebears and their choice-making, all the while suffering, inescapably, from the consequences of those actions. Regarding the (un)knowability of such pasts, Sim’s title is ambivalent. In one reading, it stakes a claim that our bewilderment will eventually recompose as knowledge. It is just as plausible, however, that we delude ourselves—that what is slippery will stay escaping our comprehension.

This essay concerns the photographic series Remnants. Though iterations differ, it consists primarily of landscapes⁸ imaged along the deportation trail, from present-day Malaysia through Thailand into China. Sim recreates the path of Shen’s forced migration, retracing the geographic line of a historical event. She wants to know him, desperately. And like a detective, Remnants is an effort to image, with a degree of added closeness if not authenticity, her grandfather’s progress through space.

^{Image: Sim Chi Yin, Remnants #1, 2015–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.}

Why such fidelity? Why a reenactment? The hope at the outset, I think, is for the labour of tracing, the physical effort and reverent attentiveness, to grant her some proof of what happened—for land to show what the absent person cannot say. The secret wish: to have Shen’s world disclose itself to his rightful heir. Even a moment’s lucidity matters, here, for any salvaged detail to illuminate his “ideas, ideals and the choices [he] made at that time.”⁹ Call it proof or call it evidence. It is that “burdened expectation [to] find,” in the words of Al-An deSouza—speaking of his own lens-based series on homecoming—the past “the way it really was.”¹⁰ Of course, Sim is not “coming home” in jungles she has never visited. Yet, in overcoming the gravity of absence that incapacitated her family’s language of memory for over half a century, in tracing the route of Shen’s withdrawal from the role of husband, father, and principal, I imagine a kind of desire works its way into her body. A body enacting a wish, cleaving to a bygone trail, and hoping to become a chance archivist. Sim longs to dispel a man’s unknowability. The landscape, his last and most material witness, awaits her identification. And while it is irrational, she may very well wish for a key in the mountains and woods to unlock the past’s mysteries—to make it, finally, make sense.

Remnants does not offer clarity. Its constitutive photographs are more impressionistic than empirical. A handful present such blurred and gloomy environments that one would be remiss not to consider the formal properties, even bounds, of the medium at work. Image after image fails to stabilise or secure, in a commanding fashion, the objects under scrutiny. If Sim’s journey is motivated in part by the incentive of discovery, of finding personal loss imputed to the very textures of the land, then, in Remnants such a dream disintegrates. Her camera is shouldered out of any entitlement to material memory. It is unable to establish a vantage for clear sight, much less insight.

On the deportation trail, there is no place ripe for the taking as a photograph, only a world uninterested in matching the tenor of her grief. It offers just what is, a territory independent of her desire. A plane of immanence: empty, abandoned, sometimes rusted, other times clouded or overgrown. An earth flittingly occupied by movement and rarely ever by revelation. This is all she sees. It is what impresses upon her mind, throwing it off, as in the image of a monkey with a bloody, half-missing head, or obstinate in its disregard, like the man scratching his back with a fist-sized hook. Sim is fascinated by these visions. But they are not visions of what was. Only a reminder of what the oral historian Svetlana Alexeivich once put so well, that “we look at the past from today; we cannot look at it from anywhere else.”¹¹

Sim’s photographs turn out a touch too near, too shaky, too indistinct—at all times a bit off, with neither the wide view’s rich contextualisation nor the extreme close-up’s surgical detail. They are, instead, experiments in form, meditating on the device and its limits, playing with acuity, with colour and texture, shadow and light. They are a woman learning to unsee the desired shape of a lost patriarch, which does not jibe with the lay of the land. So, Remnants disengages the world-historical question of Shen’s disappearance. It becomes a study of all the ways persons and things cease to be visible in time—that, and what takes their place.      And though scouring the trail cannot yield evidence of an interiority that was, Sim’s sensitive observation does return her, and her viewers, to the immensity that is.

^{Image: Sim Chi Yin, Remnants #11, 2015–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.}

Why create such aberrated images, which draw attention to their aestheticised surfaces and away from a sense of the historical or archival past? Why this resistance to showing aspects of the deportation trail in conclusive light? These are questions that implicate both a modality of desiring temporal possessions and a practice of viewing artworks about time. Approached in sequence, their answers galvanise a practice of postcolonial looking, a critique of ocular desire levelled through the forms images take.

In the first instance, Sim’s overture rubs against how we want the world to be marked by happenings long ago and recounted in objects in the aftermath. Her photographs do not grant any secret coherence to the terrain. She cannot retrieve things from the undergrowth—no artefacts with which to establish a proprietorship over her absent grandfather’s journey. By highlighting, rather, the unsurety of the image, Remnants mutes a certain will to repair. The work is not trying to return a person or a group of deportees to history or, even, the archive. Achille Mbembe notes the colonial logic of that archive, writing that it “does away with doubt…It then acquires the status of proof. It is proof that a life truly existed, that something actually happened, an account of which can be put together.”¹² At variance with this order, Sim’s photographs instantiate doubt. The too-muchness of the world overwhelms her sensor, shuddering its mock stability. In this, Remnants is neither counterarchival nor counterhistorical. It is a willful disavowal of a colonial-archival plot. Her work emphasises the lush and immense contemporary, refraining from archeologising the terrain or trail. Such photography does not set out to make a legible, historical case.

The surfaces that catch Sim’s eye and lens engross it completely, in the moment, often with an unfocusing intensity. For a viewer seeking a sense of the past, such presentness can feel like a detour. This is intentional obscurantism. The aestheticised landscapes do short-change a viewer of history, consolidating no reparative vision of the peninsular past. There is only the surface. A layer deflecting unmet expectations back at its observers, forcing them to consider what goes, so often, unnoticed: a governing logic to temporal fact-finding and possession-making. The ways we want to claim and be claimed by things in time.

Mbembe calls the colony “a desire-producing machine.”¹³ Writing in an African context, he discloses its technique of domination as one that “leave[s] its imprint on the spaces that they [the colonised] inhabit as indelible traces on the imaginary.”¹⁴ It is a “morphogenous power,” he writes,¹⁵ the power to press patterns into the body and mind, shaping the grammar of a people’s longing. The colony ruined worlds. It maligned or destroyed what was; it salvaged the convenient, profitable, and amusing. Much of what does not legibly persist in the postcolonial present—as evidence, as lived presence, as record, as memory—met its end by some machination of that cruel project. Omnia El Shakry labels the situation, in the Arab context, a “history without documents.”¹⁶ Iterating upon this same sense of lack, and the urge to heal it, the curator Chang Tsong-Zung rues, in his guide to Sim’s work:

Many societies even require the help of ethnographers and professional academics to read their grandparents’ ways of life and the particular knowledge that grew out of their own world. We are inheritors of a century of historical erasure.¹⁷

Taken as a whole, Sim’s engagement with the past militates against this century of erasure. An indefatigable optimism spurs her to refuse the given, those fields of emptiness. One Day We’ll Understand assembles “unrecorded stories, songs, memories, artifacts and documents,” nursing vestiges, smothered recollections, and closeted mementos into “an unofficial, alternate archive.”¹⁸ It strives to detail, in this way, the lives and things the colonial system interdicted and excised.

^{Image: Sim Chi Yin, Remnants #15, 2015–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.}

But Remnants does more. Its intimacy with erased spaces does not serve to fill them in or write over cultivated blanks. Returning us, rather, to the present milieu, these images set the nonpresence of a grandfather aside. Sim’s photographs, precisely by not performing that recuperative task, draw attention to the spontaneous quotidian equations by which subjects tend to know, beforehand, the kinds of “remnants” they require and the people or methods that will help “reclaim” a correct material-narrative relation to the past. If Remnants existed within the foregoing logic, it would consist of a set of recognition stills. The camera would locate things, patrimonial familiars would shoot and classify them and put them on genealogical display. The deportation landscape would transform, waymarked by points of resonance. Most of the trail would fade into irrelevance.

In wanting a certain relationship to the past, marked by the presence of specific sorts of memories and mementos, are we not tacitly subscribed to a system that authorises only certain kinds of knowing across time? What if this regime of authentication, through which time’s materials become legible, differentially valued, and desired, is not a neutral system? If it is, in itself, a by-product of the very same coloniality that first deprived us of our belongings, then more objects (images or stories) cannot save us.

Sim’s photographs, I argue, strive to unsettle an inherited temporal imaginary. They ask us why: Why do we crave a certain kind of photographic purchase on the past? Why do we not query, even if it pains us, the system that makes such desire second nature? In Remnants, the sites we mine for memory are more here, in the now, than there, where our loss resides.

No wonder Mbembe’s injunction, that “to remember the colony is…to undertake a critique of both time and the artefacts that ultimately serve as substitutes for the substance of time itself.”¹⁹ Critique being, after Judith Butler, a practice of “identify[ing] the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears.”²⁰ Remnants’ formal aberrations operate on this register, levying a critique of time and its materials, asking how we come to want them as we do and gesturing at the damage that finds expression in such habits of yearning. Sim’s wandering eye does, in fact, bracket one genre of yearning, which appears to be the natural by-product of familial loss. No photographic archive can make up for a grandfather’s non-presence in her life. Why enter a landscape committed to a false promise? As if the cataloguing of objects or sites can recoup, in any substantive sense, the lived impossibility of intergenerational communion. Sim’s deprivation is not tied solely to Shen’s physical or narrative absence, then, it is linked to the governing logic of repair wherein an imaginary wants her to see the land as privy to more than it can be. But what if the land is just land and the trail a trail shared but not cache to hidden intimacies?

In shedding the dream of recovery, the photographs disavow a colonial imaginary that would keep Sim perpetually circling the drain of time: unable to find any adequate remainder of the lost subject but unwilling to stop looking (for there is no other opening by which to assimilate this loss). Freed of this compulsion, Remnants becomes a photography of the now, showing us the places one goes when one follows the dead. A katabasis in the woods, at the edge of the water, in the face of elephants and with a view of the hills. A path through the forest in the twenty-first century. Nowhere else and nothing more. Sim is present to the riven earth, and in these photographs, it pushes forth to meet her.  

II: The Look of Love

Photography is also an act of love.
—Hervé Guibert²¹

The way Sim sees the world, as if for the first time, the way she transduces that energy, the heat of place, into a photograph, and occasions a mixing of her vision with that of a device and, later, with those of a viewing public—all of these are aspects in a gazing chain. This assembly begins the moment an image forms, when its maker picks it out of a stock and relates, through its formal qualities, the tone and substance of her aesthetic intervention. The works, seen in this light, eschew a temporal imaginary that meters historical desire via the laying of special citational claims upon objects and landscapes. Gripped by that which is materially there, not for its positive evocation of a past that was, but because of its phenomenal charge in the present, the images get at what the philosopher Kelly Oliver calls “the ethical foundation of [a] politics.” They “take us…beyond seeing as, to a realm where our confidence as seers or knowers is shaken to its foundations.”²² In these shuddered and wandering frames, “vision itself [becomes] a process, a becoming, rather than the sovereign of recognition.”²³

Oliver theorises a non-dominative practice of looking. She argues that when “the beloved becomes fixed, stable, recognizable, part of an economy of exchange, then love cannot be maintained.”²⁴ Hers is not a theory of photography, in particular. But when she speaks of “the look of love,” “a critical love that recognizes its own limitations,”²⁵ of “critical eye[s]” that reach out “toward otherness,”²⁶ I cannot help but think of Remnants. What is a search for one’s ancestors and their residues driven by if not love?

^{Image: Sim Chi Yin, Remnants #3, 2015–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.}

Oliver distinguishes between the two kinds of looking: a gaze that dominates in fixity and a gaze that does not. The same base ocular impulse unfurls in two distinct idioms. The former, a stabilising endeavour, bends to the colonial sensibility. This look is committed to an imaginary of recognition, a seeing always for the second-to-nth time; it has a clear vision of how the past ought to have been and how it should obtain, today. This gaze searches for objects-as-backfill for a defined hole of history.²⁷

The look of love, on the contrary, begins in a “here,” aware of its limited visual aptitude. It is a disposition of sensory humility. Sim might know the field of her desire—a missing grandfather’s deportation route, for example—but as a looker, she does not delude herself into thinking that any point along that trail will yield simple, portable insights. For every patch under observation, a million patches, a great expanse, thrums and whispers beyond her ambit. The look of cameratic love produces aberrated photographs. They congeal in a processing of what Fred Moten once called the “necessity and immensity of the alternative,” that which “surrounds and aerates the contained, contingent fixity of the standard.”²⁸ Sim’s images grow marked and wildered by this immensity of the land. A hand, a sensor, a series—all begin to tremble with the world.²⁹

The performance theorist André Lepecki argues that the body of a “re-enactor” is not engaged in an archivist’s task, but that it is, itself, a corporeal archive.³⁰ His writing, though it is about dance, helps frame the body of the one who made Remnants, the body whose shaking, along that retraced route, passed into her images. Lepecki speaks of the

constitutive precariousness, perceptual blind-spots, linguistic indeterminations, muscular tremors, memory lapses, bleedings, rages, and passions [that traverse] the body as archive re-plac[ing] and divert[ing] notions of archive away from a documental deposit or a bureaucratic agency dedicated to the (mis)management of ‘the past.’³¹

In his view, to approach the past via re-enactment is not doomed, inexorably, to failure or insipidity. If the imperfect body is read as an archive in its own right, as an active site “fully connected to the present”³² with “its own consistency,”³³ then a performer can help actualise a historical dance’s latent potential. Released from the dogma of the documental deposit, a body can remould the work that was, “bypass[ing] the arresting force of authorial authority”³⁴ in order to grapple with the substance of its constitution, as material negotiable in the current moment.

Sim can, ultimately, infer little of Shen’s life from her retracing act. At the journey’s end, she does find an “obelisk built to commemorate…his martyrdom.”³⁵ But no secrets turn up to vindicate her relationship to him or his relationship to their family—the one that weeded him out of its history.³⁶ Unable to find the species of evidence an archivist requires, Sim’s professional ambitions disintegrate. Remnants sees her withdrawing from an archivist’s task. She gives up on trying to transpose times that will not layer, one upon another. She permits her body to come back to itself, in the present, as gauge and witness to the world at hand. She lets it be “what a body might have always been…nothing other than an archive.”³⁷ An archive with two legs and a camera. Sim begins to make and unmake meaning, then, averring her own capacity to see the land in the spirit of a grandfather: he, who will forever remain in brute colonial absence is now, also, in infinite postcolonial excess, not “available” to her, as if an object of disenchanted study, but with her, within her, as flesh of her flesh, eyes of her eyes.

Reconceiving the body in this way renders an archive of limited capacity, in Oliver’s visual sense, and one that is precarious, tremored, and indeterminate, to use Lepecki’s verbiage. It is also revolutionary. A construct of loving looking. Looking in the trembling now. Joyful, generative, a tad unsteady. It is an active aesthetic embroilment with time—its wondrous particulars, its “weave of possibilities.”³⁸ So, Remnants repudiates a logic that would leave the artist perpetually failing to become a proper temporal subject. Sim makes what she does not know and will not have the fertile basis for seeing the world afresh. The inheritance of erasure cannot damn her anymore. It serves, rather, as an impetus for a postcolonial aesthetic project that strives to reconstitute time’s imaginary, bit by bit, in the aberrated surfacing³⁹ of an overwhelming present.

Not all postcolonial artworks trouble the dominant sensibility with which time is understood. Only some move beyond formulas of repair and diversification into a critique of the imaginary.⁴⁰ When a work does so, it imparts a responsibility to its audience. The look of love, after all, is a disposition of the eye in and of time. It implicates both the maker and the viewer’s practices of seeing, demanding that they suspend their belays in the longue durée. This art demands that we exit time. It is an art soliciting, through its make, a kind of superficial attention. Before such work, a viewer is primed to compress an object down to its constitutive surfaces in the present. They are prompted to keep, no matter how imperfectly, the claims of the past apart (even if those claims spurred the work’s creation). The force of an aesthetic encounter, here, turns on a beholding of what is evident upon the skin of a work. Only then can the look of love, as a disposition, pass from maker to viewer.

The scholars Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus speak of a surface reading, a method of critical appraisal grounded in the obvious characteristics of a text. Their theory, though primarily literary, helps scaffold my own argument about visual art, where temporal critique arises from a similar, superficial layer. Best and Marcus quote Michel Foucault, on his archival methodology, to further their argument:

[R]ather than dig for “relations that are secret, hidden, more silent or deeper than . . . consciousness,” [Foucault] described himself as seeking “to define the relations on the very surface of discourse” and “to make visible what is invisible only because it’s too much on the surface of things.”⁴¹

For Foucault, it was the commonplace aspects of the archive, its “too much” or self-evident qualities, that merited attention. In making the surface his object, the Frenchman insinuates that it is far too easy to disregard what is obvious. A race to the depths of things, when instated as an organising principle, risks its own material obfuscations. In the rest of their piece, Best and Marcus continue to champion the surface, that which “insists on being looked at rather than…see[n] through.”⁴² Taking aim at a practice of “symptomatic” reading, they contend that “the moments that arrest us in a text need not be considered symptoms, whose true cause exists on another plane of reality, but can themselves indicate important and overlooked truths.”⁴³

^{Image: Sim Chi Yin, Remnants #12, 2015–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.}

If our means of access to the past is damaged by colonialism at degree zero, perhaps, in art, this need not be a dysregulation to disavow or undercut or veil. Perhaps, in art alone, it can simply be what is. The elemental ground of temporal being in the wake of empire. Truths to believe in and build around, not strive to symptomatically fix. The obvious facts, today, are so often unseemly. They obtain as turbidities, as aberrated images, as substances resistant to recognisable resolutions or verisimilar forms. The surface reader is a reader in the now. She knows that the intractable face of an art object is trying to relate something beyond remedial language or reparative historiography. It is showing us what it feels like to live now, without prejudice to the better ways we might have been and should indeed know. In truth, we know so little. Remnants reminds us that the aesthetic encounter often amounts to something less than justice. But in that difference, it can become something more like love.

Reflecting on images of atrocity, the theorist W. J. T. Mitchell stresses their more-than-evidential qualities. He writes of viewership and responsibility, of “a devotional aesthetics that refuses to reduce [such photographs] to their merely narrative informational value.”⁴⁴ The phrase “devotional aesthetics” appeals to me. It feels tied to faith in the present and to an ethics of this span: the making and taking of responsibility toward what is sighted, what is felt, what is unacceptable right here, right now, past and future be damned. Oliver recounts how Jacques Derrida broke with many philosophers of his generation on the matter of ethics. They were to him, unlike the rest, about “the singular, the event, what is unique to each life and each moment of that life.”⁴⁵ Exiting all times except the slivered patch before us serves as a reminder of the infinity at stake in each moment of our lives, if only we could bear to see it. The right kind of artwork does not allow us to leave or burrow into hidden depths. It holds us in place on the skin of that truth, forcing us to act, to care, to feel for this world as part of its moving immanence. This, at least, is what I believe. Not always, I’ll admit, but perhaps more importantly, from time to time.

Karno Dasgupta (he/they) is an interdisciplinary writer and researcher from Kathmandu. Born in Kolkata, they grew up first in Nepal, and later, Abu Dhabi. Karno’s work concerns what a philosopher once called “the difficulty of reality.” Schooled in performance studies, he is interested in the aesthetics of ordinary life in the postcolony, with its textures of viciousness and dignity, its tensions in time (of history, of memory), its claims in language and of identity. Karno writes about art because it allows him to approach ethical questions he desires to ponder but cannot, by other means, broach, and because art is sometimes very beautiful.

Notes

^{1. Al-An deSouza, “My Mother, My Sight,” in Allan deSouza: A Decade of Photoworks, 1998-2008 (2008).}

^{2. Chang Tsong-Zung, “One Day We’ll Understand: Exhibition Guide,” hanart TZ Gallery, 2019, https://chiyinsim.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/C-20190603-One-Day-Well-Understand-exhibition-guide-final.pdf.}

^{3. Ibid.}

^{4. Ibid.}

^{5. Ibid.}

^{6. Ibid.}

^{7. “House Programme: One Day We’ll Understand,” Esplanade, 2024, https://www.esplanade.com/whats-on/festivals-and-series/series/the-studios/events/one-day-well-understand.}

^{8. The series appears to have multiple editions, some consisting only of the landscapes while others include images of artifacts/objects. The version of Remnants presented at the Istanbul Biennial, for example, seems to involve just the landscapes, as per Hattam in “Photographing History’s Silences and Gaps.” An earlier version is comprised of both these images and “unembellished photographs of 32 of the objects she has made still-life studies of from her visits with the old left across southern China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and southern Thailand,” as noted in Chi Yin, “‘One Day We’ll Understand.’”}

^{9. Tsong-Zung, “One Day We’ll Understand: Exhibition Guide.”}

^{10. deSouza, “My Mother, My Sight.”}

^{11. Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Books, 2018), xxiv.}

^{12. Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002), 21.}

^{13. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Duke University Press, 2017), 120.}

^{14. Ibid., 127.}

^{15. Ibid., 104.}

^{16. Omnia El Shakry, “‘History without Documents’: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (June 2015): 920–34.}

^{17. Tsong-Zung, “One Day We’ll Understand: Exhibition Guide.”}

^{18. Sim Chi Yin, “‘One Day We’ll Understand.’” Artist’s Website. sim chi yin. Accessed September 18, 2024, https://chiyinsim.com/one-day-well-understand/.}

^{19. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 104.}

^{20. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Fordham University Press, 2013), 109.}

^{21. Hervé Guibert, Ghost Image, trans. Robert Bononno (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 10.}

^{22. Kelly Oliver, “Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (November 23, 2015): 486.}

^{23. Kelly Oliver, “The Look of Love,” Hypatia 16, no. 3 (2001): 76.}

^{24. Ibid., 74.}

^{25. Ibid., 72.}

^{26. Ibid., 73.}

^{27. Ibid., 74.}

^{28. Fred Moten, “Necessity, immensity, and crisis (many edges/seeing things),” Floor: Poetics of Everyday Critique 1, no. 1 (2011).}

^{29. Édouard Glissant, “The Earth is Trembling”: ÉDOUARD GLISSANT in conversation with HANS ULRICH OBRIST | 032c. Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, December 20, 2021.}

^{30. André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 34.}

^{31. Ibid.}

^{32. Ibid., 30.}

^{33. Ibid., 34.}

^{34. Ibid., 35.}

^{35. Chi Yin, “‘One Day We’ll Understand.’”}

^{36. Ibid.}

^{37. Lepecki, “The Body as Archive,” 34.}

^{38. deSouza, “My Mother, My Sight.”}

^{39. For more on surfacing, see: “Fred Moten, A Defense of Two-Dimensionality,” Teatro do Bairro Alto, July 12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar-KGGlD3GY&ab_channel=TeatrodoBairroAlto.}

^{40. Photographic series by Al-an DeSouza (The Lost Pictures), An-My Lê (Small Wars, 29 Palms), Tomoko Yoneda (The Parallel Lives of Others) and Amin Yousefi (Ashes and Snow) spring to mind.}

^{41. As quoted in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1 (November 1, 2009): 13.}

^{42. Ibid., 9.}

^{43. Ibid., 18.}

^{44. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Response to Griselda Pollock: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Trauma Photographs,” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (Cornell Paperbacks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 240.}

^{45. Kelly Oliver, “Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (November 23, 2015): 489.}