the Gaze and the Self, is a praxis-based inquiry curated by YITJUOK AGWET for Museum Management and Heritage as a Career (GAS 616) course, MA program in Museum & Critical Heritage Studies track at the Global Studies University. It explores an encounter of six colonial-era photographs digitized as part of Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource by the Pitt Rivers Museum, with six contemporary paintings of Akot Solip, spanning roughly, a century of visual representation from and of the region known today as the Republic of South Sudan.
Rather than offering a corrective or comparative analysis, the work dwells in the space between archive and art, colonial gaze and self-representation. I articulate a position of patient, double-looking, while inviting viewers to resist resolution and instead experience looking twice. The pairing of photographs and paintings constitutes the praxis work: theory made visible through curatorial and digital choices.
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