Greetings from the Colonies Safia Belmenouar and Marc Combier collections
The postcard is part of our history, our imagination. It is also, given its extremely wide circulation, a privileged reinforcement of ideology. The postcards from the Colonies shown here were exchanged between Westerners and remained unknown by those represented on them. Through them, the homeland believed it was discovering peoples when, in fact, what it saw were mere representations. Here the women have no names, they are merely ‘types’. The body a good like any other, exoticism its stock in trade. The cards’ sometimes erotic nature does not seem to hamper easy familiarity with the object. This exotic and erotic representation of the body is merely another ideological construction, in this instance with an emphasis on the feminine. Greetings from the Colonies looks with the eyes of today at this iconography, not ignoring the historical contexts in which it was the product of a masculine and colonial domination. These women from the four corners of the Empire have a single quality in common: they are not the subjects of their own story. A pure construction of the gaze, the colonial postcard does not capture real women, their complexity, in a word, their otherness.
Safia Belmenouar, Curator
https://vimeo.com/99524425
EXHIBITION
Greetings from the Colonies Safia Belmenouar and Marc Combier collections
In Part of Rencontres d’Arles 2014
From July 7th to September 21st, 2014
Bureau Des Lices
13200 Arles
France
http://www.rencontres-arles.com
