KENYATTA A.C. HINKLE:

My name is Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle. I collect a lot of archival images of postcards of women who are from colonial West Africa. Their pictures were taken some with their permission, some without the permission. These images were distributed all throughout the world as expressions of colonial power. And I stumbled across this woman’s gaze. It was something about her eyes and how she was just really confronting the viewer. There’s so much agency. And then I noticed the writing said, “No, this is not my…” Does that say “little”? Does it say “birth”? And then it goes on to say “niece.” And I just kept thinking, then what is she to you? And why do you need to say that? It’s a joke. It’s literally like this joke, but it’s very disturbing. And it tells so much about the situation without really having to say much. She sat in my studio for a very, very long time and I had to keep going back and forth and negotiating, like, what does this figure want? That’s when I started working with collage elements. So when I brought over this abstracted piece, I felt like she was like, okay, that’s the one. This is essentially a lot of cut out and collage that is doing the interrupting of this colonial narrative. I have to go in and really think about what does it mean to retrieve an image from its intended purposes and to disrupt everything about it so that the viewer can enter into it in a different way, so that I can shift the viewer from a spectator to a witness. We can’t think about the future until we contend with the past.