Projecting A Body

BV: Another figure who emerges throughout Senderos is Sarita Colonia. How did she come to occupy such a significant place in the work?

TK: Across my work I grapple with emptiness, using both writing and photography to reflect on my relationship to origins, transracial adoption and orphanhood. The figure of Sarita Colonia has supported me in this practice, and she appears in many forms throughout the work – she is an unofficial catholic folk saint in Lima, considered “the saint of the people”. I discovered her when I was researching the institutional silence, racism and dismissal that indigenous women were met with when they tried to report sexual assault. Sarita Colonia is a cultural icon whose own story is shaped by this repressed trauma and institutional silencing. Her figure emerges in times of crisis and social upheaval because she represents the resilience of indigenous women, the working class, and migrant communities. She helped me to understand the role of storytelling, folklore, and magical realism within Peru’s patriarchal culture where crimes against indigenous women were not openly discussed, were repressed and went largely unrecorded.

BV: The question of how violence is documented, or goes unrecorded, also emerges in 1979 Contact Negatives. The year 1979 marks both your birth in Lima and a turning point in Peru's history, as the country emerged from military rule and approached decades of political violence and unrest. In this series you return to this period through photographs published in Peruvian magazines, where you discovered that the images did not always correspond to the people or events described in their captions. How did this discovery change your understanding of the archive and photography's role as evidence?

TK: At first, when I started creating the series, I wanted to go back to the actual locations of sexual violence depicted in the 1979 magazines I collected in Lima. My intention was to “re-photograph” the locations in the present day. Soon I discovered that this would be impossible because the locations were not necessarily real. These photographs do not operate in the expected way. For example, the same photo accompanying a story about sexual assault in one month’s issue might be used to illustrate an entirely different story, circumstance or crime in another month’s issue. In other words, the locations in the photos - even when an address is given - are not always the actual locations where the events took place. The people depicted are also not necessarily the people referred to in the stories or captions.

Photography’s roles as witness and evidence become tremendously complicated in the context of these magazines. Something that may look like a journalistic or news item sits somewhere between the real and the imagined – operating more like a stock photo, stand-in, proxy or substitute.

At this point I had been working with found photographs and archival documents for many years, so this discovery did not surprise me as much as it reinforced my understanding of the archive as always unstable, changing and malleable. In a way, these magazines and photographs – and the way they are depicting Peru’s history – mirror my own relationship to origins.

BV: Your images bring together different places, bodies and moments in time, yet the processes through which you make them are often slow, repetitive and physically demanding. I'm interested in how the labour of collecting and working with these materials becomes part of the work itself. How does this sustained engagement shape your relationship to the archive and the histories it contains?

TK: A curator once asked me where I found these magazines as she assumed I bought them on eBay, but the act of collecting and assembling the materials with my own hands was part of the work for me. I started collecting the magazines nearly 15 years ago; I found them discarded in old dingy basements and at book stalls in Peru. It took years to cobble together this unofficial “archive” of 1979, rescuing it quite literally from debris. After a day of sifting and searching I would come back to my studio completely covered in the smell of musty basements, my hands sticky and black. The magazines themselves smelled mouldy and bugs had eaten tiny holes through the pages. My relationship to these materials therefore began with a bodily connection, before I even began working with them in the studio.

In Senderos I use rephotographic processes of layering, performance, and repetition to activate the archive through the body. I have worked with these magazines and photographs for many years and I continue to go back into them rearranging, reassessing, reimagining and remembering. Throughout my work, I am engaged in a dialogue with history. I am interested in the differences and similarities between processes such as remediation, reenactment, reinterpretation, reappropriation, homage, emulation, arrangement and reproduction. This ‘re-ness’ is a way of returning to existing images and histories without simply repeating them.

When I initially began travelling to Lima in 2011, I rented a cheap empty studio with no plans. I had a room, a 35mm camera, a bag of film, my body, and the city. I intentionally resisted literal self-portraiture. I would go out and collect materials during the day and bring them back into the studio to see what I could do with them. In a way, a lot of my work with archival material has this element of chance encounter. A conversation begins to emerge between the fieldwork – or the act of collecting materials around the city – and the studio work of building temporary juxtapositions between the materials and re-photographing them. At the time I was looking at artists such as Barbara Kasten and Leslie Hewitt, but I was also reading Miguel López and the writings of performance artist Giuseppe Campuzano.

BV: This physical relationship to the archive takes on another dimension in 1979 Contact Negatives, where your body becomes the surface onto which archival photographs are projected. The series began as a live performance before becoming the photographs we see in the exhibition. What does bringing your own body into these images make possible that working with the archival material alone might not?

TK: Yes, my body is the medium. When I am working with archival documents, I use my body to re-stage, re-produce, re-enact and resurrect the past. 1979 Contact Negatives began as a live performance and the photographs you see in the exhibition are documents of that performance. I projected images from 1979 Peruvian political magazines onto my body. I either stand in and directly trace the outline of the bodies projected onto me or hold them figuratively through the architecture of the stage I create. During these performances I use the gallery as a temporary darkroom and photo studio. Floor-to-ceiling sheets of white paper and rectangular blocks form the stage and backdrop. You can see my body in the photographs holding the cable release.

I had been working with the magazines for years and my book featuring the work, titled RePose, was ready to be published, but I still wanted a way to exhibit this work that was not static because so much of the difficulty of making the work was about movement, instability and unknowing. I wanted an audience to experience the process: the ghostly projections filling a darkened room, large wooden 8x10 cameras with dark cloths over them hovering around with my cable release attached to me like an umbilical cord.

BV: Returning to existing images and histories is central to your practice, but what happens when you return to your own work? You've spoken about how an artwork can take on different meanings over time. What does revisiting something you made years earlier reveal to you?

TK: Yes, I mean, I encounter this not just with my own art but also with art that I come back to again and again. It is almost like listening to a favourite song of mine from when I was 14 years old you know? The lyrics come flooding back and I am singing along without realizing it, and I can even remember the reason why it was so powerful to me at that time, but it is the awareness of both the past self and the present self-collapsed into one that makes this song resonate. I think returning to my “earlier” artwork is similar and necessitates an ongoing dialogue across time. What is revealed to me is that the art we make and thrust into the world has a life and its meaning evolves and is shaped over time in ways that are out of my control.