The mechanisms of ocularity as power

There is a problem that runs beneath the surface of contemporary art's most progressive self-descriptions. We speak readily of decolonising the institution, of expanding the canon, of making visible what has been marginalised. What we speak of less readily, perhaps because it is harder to name without implicating the very systems of description we rely on, is the specific mechanism by which certain geographies are constituted as sites of cultural production while being simultaneously constituted as incapable of producing theory. This is the condition that the ten articles assembled here allow us to think. The condition has a name in the research that motivated this selection: geo-ocularity. It names the specific intersection of geography and visuality through which the dominant epistemic economy of art discourse operates, not through explicit erasure but through a structural visual economy in which specific positions are maximally visible as objects of exhibition and minimally visible as generators of theoretical knowledge.

The articles gathered here examine how the geo-ocular condition operates across varied colonially structured geographies, under conditions of racialisation. What they share is a sustained attention to the specific ways in which the intersection of geography and visibility produces knowledge or forecloses it. Catalina Imizcoz traces this foreclosure back to the exhibitionary form itself, arguing with Mignolo and Quijano that the modern paradigm of the exhibition was constituted as a colonial apparatus: a machine for producing certain geographies as universally visible and certain knowledges as universally theoretical, at the precise expense of the geographies and knowledges it rendered as local, specific, and illustrative. Patricia Lorenzoni demonstrates how landscape, as a visual genre, produces geographies as scenery rather than as sites of knowing, how the colonial gaze transforms land into an aesthetic object while simultaneously stripping it of its epistemological significance. Axelle Karera shows how even the most apparently progressive concepts, such as the Anthropocene, planetary responsibility, and ecological crisis, can reproduce the colonial invisibilisation of Black and Indigenous ecological knowledge by claiming universality without examining the geography of that claim.

Other articles in the selection attend to what counter-practice looks like from within this condition. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's reading of Simone Leigh proposes a visual economy in which the Black female body appears not as the object of an exhibitionary gaze but as the site that generates a different scopic regime altogether, one that refuses both hypervisibility and its corollary, silence. Marelys Valencia's account of Carlos Martiel demonstrates how the Black body becomes a site where geopolitical regimes of visibility are enacted and contested simultaneously: seen, but refusing the terms of its seeing. The conversation between Oscar Hemer, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Masande Ntshanga, and Ivan Vladislavić on the failure of the “rainbow nation” narrative refuses the spectacular constitution of South African knowledge in favour of a plurality of voices that insist on the opacity and irreducibility of intellectual life on the continent, on the right, as Glissant would have it, not to be understood on the dominant system's terms.

The remaining articles approach geo-ocularity from its structural and reproductive dimensions. Nicholas De Genova's account of subordinate inclusion shows how certain geographies and populations are incorporated into European epistemological space in ways that simultaneously make them visible and render them politically and intellectually absent, a mechanism that operates in the art world with particular efficiency. Annelies Vaneycken's collective autotheory proposes that the dominant scopic regime's demand for individual, locatable, transparent knowledge producers can be refused through the collective and opaque negotiations of a group whose shared situatedness becomes the site of theoretical production rather than its obstacle. The love letters of Nobunye Levin and Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe, formally resistant to extraction, demanding to be encountered whole, propose in literary form what the dissertation argues African women's ecological aesthetics proposes in visual and curatorial form: that the transformation of the visual-epistemic economy requires not better visibility within existing terms but new terms altogether.