Dua Abbas Rizvi
About the artwork
My project consists of a series of screen prints of pages from a found photo album, shorn of its photographs (having been found that way), a moving image work that combines fragments of home movies and erroneous prints taken over the course of a year, and folded paper forms. While the works touch upon several themes that have been central to my artistic practice over the years, such as memory, erasure, feminist revisionism, and postcoloniality, they are essentially expressions of my interest in language, subjectivity, and issues of context. By playing with both physical and linguistic markers of ‘place’ in these works (the leftover photo-corners in the album and deictic expressions like “here”, “there”, “before”, “then”, etc. in the moving image work), I pose questions about contextualisation, indexicality, and the power inherent in taking up a point-of-view. In turn, these ideas reflect on what it means to look and be looked at, to read too much or too little into something, and to lose one’s place in a physical and geographical but also narratological sense.
About the artist
Dua Abbas Rizvi is a visual artist with a background in literature and art journalism. In her artistic practice, Rizvi draws attention to the visual and verbal expression of power in archives, histories, and cartographies. She works with both ‘found’ and original printed media and textual fragments to reflect on visibility and erasure, literal and metaphysical notions of distance and contiguity, and the intersection of private and public memory.
