I am an associate professor, art writer and critical theorist specializing in contemporary art at the intersection of globalization and climate change, especially in the Asia Pacific Region. I am also a specialist on sixties expanded arts: Pop, Assemblage, Neo-Dada, Fluxus, New Realism, etc. -- art at the advent of the global economy and the age of plastics. You can find more on my website Address: www.jaimeyhamiltonfaris.com
This article engages weaving as a model of feminist decolonial climate justice methodology in Oce... more This article engages weaving as a model of feminist decolonial climate justice methodology in Oceania. In particular, it looks to three weaver-activists who use their practices to reclaim the matrixial power of the ocean (as maternal womb and network of relation) in the face of ongoing US occupation in the Pacific: Marshallese poet and climate activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner; Hawai'i-based settler-ally weaver and installation artist Mary Babcock; and Kanaka Maoli sculptor Kaili Chun, also based in Hawai'i. Each artist begins from a particular positionality in the ongoing open weave of the ocean and uses specific cultural ontologies of weaving and netting to address knots and gaps in climate change imaginaries. These weavers help to articulate important nuances in recent calls for working in solidarity networks at the cultural interface of climate justice activism. Their processes directly address the need for greater emotional and relational capacity across cultural and national divides, across Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminist critiques of colonial-capitalist systems and through interconnected waters.
This article describes Sāmoan-Australian artist Angela Tiatia’s performance video Lick (2015) as
... more This article describes Sāmoan-Australian artist Angela Tiatia’s performance video Lick (2015) as
an act of Pacific Islander survivance. Recorded in and with the coastal waters of Tuvalu, the work
emphasizes a direct and responsive encounter with the Pacific Ocean. The video’s intentional
emphasis on Tiatia’s malu, a tattoo specific to Sāmoan women, and her choregraphed leg and
hand gestures of balance represent a powerful visual proclamation of Tiatia’s Oceanic feminist
relationship with the ocean. Her performance is an important challenge to the exotifying
impulses of environmental documentaries and mainstream media that often represent Pacific
Islanders as passive victims of sea level rise. In the context of current decolonizing performance
literature and practices in Oceania, Lick is read as a strategic hydrochoreography—an embodied
art practice that expresses the lively interconnection of body-ocean rhythms needed to sustain
Indigenous futures.
The video poem Rise: From One Island to Another, a 2018 collaboration between Marshallese poet Ka... more The video poem Rise: From One Island to Another, a 2018 collaboration between Marshallese poet Kathy Jetn̄ il-Kijiner and Inuk poet Aka Niviâna from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) raises key questions about the antimonies of climate mitigation and adaptation discourses across oceans and islands. As "sisters of ocean and ice," the poets reference the climate relationships between ice melt in Greenland and sea inundation of the Marshall Islands as part of the extended, but differentiated, island colonial histories of occupation, militarism, and development. Having been brought together by environmental activist organisation 350.org, Jetn̄ il-Kijiner and Niviâna also strategically use their positionalities as Indigenous islanders to critique not only the continuity between colonial and neo-liberal operations but also the continuity between colonial and environmental scopic regimes, that taken together, stymie climate change imaginaries. In response to these discourses, they claim a feminist hydro-ontological imaginary. Ultimately, the video poem allows an examination of the value of materialist hydro-feminisms and "feminism without borders" (Mohanty, 2003) to extend Island Studies frameworks of the aquapelagic-the assemblage of human interactivity with sea, land, and sky.
The following remarks are edited from an onsite interview and a public dialogue at the University... more The following remarks are edited from an onsite interview and a public dialogue at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa on March 12, 2017. The exchanges were organized by the art historians Jaimey Hamilton Faris and Margo Machida to offer an opportunity for Hawaiʻi-born artists Sean Connelly and Lynne Yamamoto to discuss their new sculptural works for the inaugural Honolulu Biennial 2017, Middle of Now|Here (March 8–May 8, 2017). Both artists installed their work at the Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu
Our Ocean Guide is a volume edited by Map-Office and Lightbox Publishing in conjunction with the... more Our Ocean Guide is a volume edited by Map-Office and Lightbox Publishing in conjunction with the Venice Biennale 2017. I curated the section on Hawai'i. As an introduction to the section, I wrote "Double Sunsets" explores the ramifications of containerization in Hawaii - the history of Matson, the islands' dependence on food and energy, and more.
This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the ... more This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the international postwar art movements of Pop, Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, happenings, and Anti-Art. It relates the independent coinage of Capitalist Realism by artists Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Manfred Kuttner in Germany in May 1963 with that of artist Akasegawa Genpei Japan in February 1964 and argues that they were both part of a broader interest in developing new strategies of artistic realism during the Cold War. The artists' sly and ironic appropriations of consumer objects and advertisements sought to capture the operations of capitalism, not only as an economy, but as an ideology that materially and systemically reproduces itself within everyday life. Relating the Cold War moment to the development of capitalism after the fall of the communist bloc, the introduction ends by addressing the strategic applicability of Capitalist Realist modes to contemporary art...
Part of the mid-eighties New Wave movement in China, which includes the likes of Xu Bing and Wend... more Part of the mid-eighties New Wave movement in China, which includes the likes of Xu Bing and Wenda Gu, Ni Haifeng is one of the most daring and explicit of that generation to deal with the history of China’s embrace of capitalism. After immigrating to The Netherlands in the mid-nineties, his work shifted away from Nonsense Calligraphy (a hallmark of the New Wave movement), and began focusing on complex historical circulations of people and goods, as well as the issues of authorship, copyright, and value that arise from trade history. In Of the Departure and the Arrival (2005), for instance, he played off the material history of Delftware, asking the citizens of Delft to contribute contemporary household objects to be copied in blue-and-white porcelain by a factory in Jingdezhen. These objects were then packed and transported back to Delft and exhibited in a display that included their shipping cartons. This piece opened up multiple avenues of investigation regarding China’s position in the global economy, resulting in one of Ni’s most famous installations, Para-production, which focused on the invisibility of Chinese labor and the sheer material weight of the global apparel manufacturing. First shown at Joyart Gallery in Beijing in 2008, it has since been included in The Global Contemporary (2011), at ZKM Karlsruhe, and The Deep of the Modern, Manifesta 9 (2012), in Genk, Belgium. Ni has also recently turned his attention to the consumer economy of art with the projects In Search of a Perfect Equation (2010) and Reciprocal Fetishism (2010), and Things Themselves (2013). Moving fluidly from the history of Dutch collections to the contemporary craze of Contemporary Chinese Art, Ni positions our present fascination for objects within a larger meditation on the desires that drive such economies.
This article engages weaving as a model of feminist decolonial climate justice methodology in Oce... more This article engages weaving as a model of feminist decolonial climate justice methodology in Oceania. In particular, it looks to three weaver-activists who use their practices to reclaim the matrixial power of the ocean (as maternal womb and network of relation) in the face of ongoing US occupation in the Pacific: Marshallese poet and climate activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner; Hawai'i-based settler-ally weaver and installation artist Mary Babcock; and Kanaka Maoli sculptor Kaili Chun, also based in Hawai'i. Each artist begins from a particular positionality in the ongoing open weave of the ocean and uses specific cultural ontologies of weaving and netting to address knots and gaps in climate change imaginaries. These weavers help to articulate important nuances in recent calls for working in solidarity networks at the cultural interface of climate justice activism. Their processes directly address the need for greater emotional and relational capacity across cultural and national divides, across Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminist critiques of colonial-capitalist systems and through interconnected waters.
This article describes Sāmoan-Australian artist Angela Tiatia’s performance video Lick (2015) as
... more This article describes Sāmoan-Australian artist Angela Tiatia’s performance video Lick (2015) as
an act of Pacific Islander survivance. Recorded in and with the coastal waters of Tuvalu, the work
emphasizes a direct and responsive encounter with the Pacific Ocean. The video’s intentional
emphasis on Tiatia’s malu, a tattoo specific to Sāmoan women, and her choregraphed leg and
hand gestures of balance represent a powerful visual proclamation of Tiatia’s Oceanic feminist
relationship with the ocean. Her performance is an important challenge to the exotifying
impulses of environmental documentaries and mainstream media that often represent Pacific
Islanders as passive victims of sea level rise. In the context of current decolonizing performance
literature and practices in Oceania, Lick is read as a strategic hydrochoreography—an embodied
art practice that expresses the lively interconnection of body-ocean rhythms needed to sustain
Indigenous futures.
The video poem Rise: From One Island to Another, a 2018 collaboration between Marshallese poet Ka... more The video poem Rise: From One Island to Another, a 2018 collaboration between Marshallese poet Kathy Jetn̄ il-Kijiner and Inuk poet Aka Niviâna from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) raises key questions about the antimonies of climate mitigation and adaptation discourses across oceans and islands. As "sisters of ocean and ice," the poets reference the climate relationships between ice melt in Greenland and sea inundation of the Marshall Islands as part of the extended, but differentiated, island colonial histories of occupation, militarism, and development. Having been brought together by environmental activist organisation 350.org, Jetn̄ il-Kijiner and Niviâna also strategically use their positionalities as Indigenous islanders to critique not only the continuity between colonial and neo-liberal operations but also the continuity between colonial and environmental scopic regimes, that taken together, stymie climate change imaginaries. In response to these discourses, they claim a feminist hydro-ontological imaginary. Ultimately, the video poem allows an examination of the value of materialist hydro-feminisms and "feminism without borders" (Mohanty, 2003) to extend Island Studies frameworks of the aquapelagic-the assemblage of human interactivity with sea, land, and sky.
The following remarks are edited from an onsite interview and a public dialogue at the University... more The following remarks are edited from an onsite interview and a public dialogue at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa on March 12, 2017. The exchanges were organized by the art historians Jaimey Hamilton Faris and Margo Machida to offer an opportunity for Hawaiʻi-born artists Sean Connelly and Lynne Yamamoto to discuss their new sculptural works for the inaugural Honolulu Biennial 2017, Middle of Now|Here (March 8–May 8, 2017). Both artists installed their work at the Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu
Our Ocean Guide is a volume edited by Map-Office and Lightbox Publishing in conjunction with the... more Our Ocean Guide is a volume edited by Map-Office and Lightbox Publishing in conjunction with the Venice Biennale 2017. I curated the section on Hawai'i. As an introduction to the section, I wrote "Double Sunsets" explores the ramifications of containerization in Hawaii - the history of Matson, the islands' dependence on food and energy, and more.
This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the ... more This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the international postwar art movements of Pop, Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, happenings, and Anti-Art. It relates the independent coinage of Capitalist Realism by artists Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Manfred Kuttner in Germany in May 1963 with that of artist Akasegawa Genpei Japan in February 1964 and argues that they were both part of a broader interest in developing new strategies of artistic realism during the Cold War. The artists' sly and ironic appropriations of consumer objects and advertisements sought to capture the operations of capitalism, not only as an economy, but as an ideology that materially and systemically reproduces itself within everyday life. Relating the Cold War moment to the development of capitalism after the fall of the communist bloc, the introduction ends by addressing the strategic applicability of Capitalist Realist modes to contemporary art...
Part of the mid-eighties New Wave movement in China, which includes the likes of Xu Bing and Wend... more Part of the mid-eighties New Wave movement in China, which includes the likes of Xu Bing and Wenda Gu, Ni Haifeng is one of the most daring and explicit of that generation to deal with the history of China’s embrace of capitalism. After immigrating to The Netherlands in the mid-nineties, his work shifted away from Nonsense Calligraphy (a hallmark of the New Wave movement), and began focusing on complex historical circulations of people and goods, as well as the issues of authorship, copyright, and value that arise from trade history. In Of the Departure and the Arrival (2005), for instance, he played off the material history of Delftware, asking the citizens of Delft to contribute contemporary household objects to be copied in blue-and-white porcelain by a factory in Jingdezhen. These objects were then packed and transported back to Delft and exhibited in a display that included their shipping cartons. This piece opened up multiple avenues of investigation regarding China’s position in the global economy, resulting in one of Ni’s most famous installations, Para-production, which focused on the invisibility of Chinese labor and the sheer material weight of the global apparel manufacturing. First shown at Joyart Gallery in Beijing in 2008, it has since been included in The Global Contemporary (2011), at ZKM Karlsruhe, and The Deep of the Modern, Manifesta 9 (2012), in Genk, Belgium. Ni has also recently turned his attention to the consumer economy of art with the projects In Search of a Perfect Equation (2010) and Reciprocal Fetishism (2010), and Things Themselves (2013). Moving fluidly from the history of Dutch collections to the contemporary craze of Contemporary Chinese Art, Ni positions our present fascination for objects within a larger meditation on the desires that drive such economies.
Uncommon Goods traces one particularly important aspect of that progression: the shift in artisti... more Uncommon Goods traces one particularly important aspect of that progression: the shift in artistic concern toward the hidden ethical dimensions of global commerce. Jaimey Hamilton Faris discusses the work of, among many others, Ai Weiwei, Cory Arcangel, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Santiago Sierra, reading their artistic explorations as overlapping with debates about how common goods hold us and our world in common. The use of readymade now registers concerns about international migrant labor, outsourced manufacturing, access to natural resources, intellectual copyright, and the commoditization of virtual space.
In each chapter, Hamilton Faris introduces artists who exemplify the focus of readymade aesthetics on aspects of global commodity culture, including consumption, marketing, bureaucracy, labor, and community. She explores how materially intensive, “uncommon” aesthetic situations can offer moments to meditate on the kinds of objects, experiences, and values we ostensibly share in the age of globalization.
Almanac for the Beyond is an edited volume of experimental eco-criticism. Providing a twist on th... more Almanac for the Beyond is an edited volume of experimental eco-criticism. Providing a twist on the almanac tradition, this collection of essays, graphs, poems, art works, miscellaneous references, and more critiques the limits of the petroculture imagination, honors the rhythms of nature, and builds capacity to attend to contemporary environmental and societal change. The edifying, mystifying, editorializing and amaz-ifying contributions offer ways to see the weather (and the climate) “beyond" current and often damaging assumptions about what can and cannot be done to predict, fix, or modify it. Beyonds are everywhere—moving towards new possibilities of regeneration and diverse futures. Published by Tropic Editions 2019.
This book was initiated by the Banff Research in Culture Group at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity led by Imre Szeman and Eva-Lynn Jagoe in the Summer of 2018. Its publication is generously supported by Future Energies System research project at University of Alberta.
In Suspense is a talk given at SLSA2017 at ASU. I explore the importance of recognizing the ocea... more In Suspense is a talk given at SLSA2017 at ASU. I explore the importance of recognizing the ocean as a liquid archive of our petrochemical lifestyle. With the help of key eco-media philosophers and artists, we are beginning to understand our environmental elements as communicative and recording media. Based on this premise, I think through the possibilities of the ocean as a "suspending" medium: a dense and salty molecular structure in which anthropogenic activities (among others) are held as records. The talk explores the strange array of petro substances that end up floating in the ocean, often far from the shore, turned under by the fierce currents, but often too light to sink all the way down to the bottom. These records are at once insoluble and almost invisible. There are millions of gallons of deep-water oil plumes lingering under surface slicks. Tons of old nylon fishing nets cut loose by commercial vessels drag across coral reefs for hundreds of miles. Plastic products float away from our shores and escape from stranded containers to gravitate toward the center of our ocean gyres. Some of this plastic breaks down into tiny beads of micro-plastic, known as mermaids' tears (these are vehicles for toxins like DDT, BPA, and PCB that, once ingested, poison the entire food chain). I will tell the tales of these insoluble substances with an understanding that they ultimately speak about the time of human experimentation relative to the slow absorptive capacity of the ocean.
This is a prepublication version of a review that is slated to appear in The Contemporary Pacific... more This is a prepublication version of a review that is slated to appear in The Contemporary Pacific, volume 30, number 1, in early 2018. It may differ from the published version.
"This spring, the Honolulu Biennial made its debut on the global art stage with a multi-venue, two-month-long exhibition featuring both established and emerging Pacific artists—including a contingent of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Hawai‘i-based artists. The exhibition also included a number of Southeast Asian artists, a few East Asian art stars, and two Middle-East-based artists, giving a first impression that the exhibition sought to emulate the “expanded regionalism” of the now well-established Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland, Australia). Yet, at least for this first iteration, there was a clear curatorial focus on the importance of Pacific contemporary art."
Inundation Art and Climate Change in the Pacific, 2020
NUNDATION refers to both the watery disasters of climate change and the overwhelming emotions the... more NUNDATION refers to both the watery disasters of climate change and the overwhelming emotions they evoke. The layered meaning of the term offers a way to reflect on the work of the nine contemporary artists in this exhibition. Based in the Pacific, they all experience the climate emergency not just as a dramatic new reality, but also as the accumulation of long-term colonial, extractive and development forces that have made their communities especially vulnerable.
Uploads
an act of Pacific Islander survivance. Recorded in and with the coastal waters of Tuvalu, the work
emphasizes a direct and responsive encounter with the Pacific Ocean. The video’s intentional
emphasis on Tiatia’s malu, a tattoo specific to Sāmoan women, and her choregraphed leg and
hand gestures of balance represent a powerful visual proclamation of Tiatia’s Oceanic feminist
relationship with the ocean. Her performance is an important challenge to the exotifying
impulses of environmental documentaries and mainstream media that often represent Pacific
Islanders as passive victims of sea level rise. In the context of current decolonizing performance
literature and practices in Oceania, Lick is read as a strategic hydrochoreography—an embodied
art practice that expresses the lively interconnection of body-ocean rhythms needed to sustain
Indigenous futures.
an act of Pacific Islander survivance. Recorded in and with the coastal waters of Tuvalu, the work
emphasizes a direct and responsive encounter with the Pacific Ocean. The video’s intentional
emphasis on Tiatia’s malu, a tattoo specific to Sāmoan women, and her choregraphed leg and
hand gestures of balance represent a powerful visual proclamation of Tiatia’s Oceanic feminist
relationship with the ocean. Her performance is an important challenge to the exotifying
impulses of environmental documentaries and mainstream media that often represent Pacific
Islanders as passive victims of sea level rise. In the context of current decolonizing performance
literature and practices in Oceania, Lick is read as a strategic hydrochoreography—an embodied
art practice that expresses the lively interconnection of body-ocean rhythms needed to sustain
Indigenous futures.
In each chapter, Hamilton Faris introduces artists who exemplify the focus of readymade aesthetics on aspects of global commodity culture, including consumption, marketing, bureaucracy, labor, and community. She explores how materially intensive, “uncommon” aesthetic situations can offer moments to meditate on the kinds of objects, experiences, and values we ostensibly share in the age of globalization.
This book was initiated by the Banff Research in Culture Group at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity led by Imre Szeman and Eva-Lynn Jagoe in the Summer of 2018. Its publication is generously supported by Future Energies System research project at University of Alberta.
"This spring, the Honolulu Biennial made its debut on the global art stage with a multi-venue, two-month-long exhibition featuring both established and emerging Pacific artists—including a contingent of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Hawai‘i-based artists. The exhibition also included a number of Southeast Asian artists, a few East Asian art stars, and two Middle-East-based artists, giving a first impression that the exhibition sought to emulate the “expanded regionalism” of the now well-established Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland, Australia). Yet, at least for this first iteration, there was a clear curatorial focus on the importance of Pacific contemporary art."