#zack khalil

[dare-g]

INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place. /it flies. falls./] (2016)

[contemporaryartdaily]

New Red Order at Artists Space

[sodomyaspraxis]

“The anthropologist’s encapsulating gaze ignores the fact that, for Indigenous communities, tradition is not an immutable set of truths handed down by revelation, but a set of ever evolving social practices whose continuity cannot be repaired by preservation—only elaborated through struggle, and finally achieved under conditions of genuine self-determination.”

“The Violence Inherent: Native Videographers Shoot Back” by Adam and Zack Khalil, from An Indigenous Present, edited by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter (2023)

[theoffingmag]

W.K.L. Dickson/Thomas Edison, Sioux Ghost Dance, 1894.

The camera is a dangerous weapon for indigenous peoples, one that has been wielded against us since its inception. Indians dancing for white audiences in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show were some of the first moving images to pass through Thomas Edison’s laboratory in 1894.

Anthropology’s obsession with preserving images of our “vanishing” cultures—through ethnographic films or archives filled with boxes of our ancestors’ remains—has long been a tool used to colonize and oppress indigenous peoples. By relegating our identities to the past and forcing us to authenticate ourselves via this past, our existence as contemporary individuals living in a colonized land is denied.

Read: The Violence Inherent - Native Videographers Shoot Back by Adam and Zack Khalil