This essay examines contemporary South Asian diasporic feminist visual art practices in response to the U.S. military’s global carceral archipelago. I analyze collaborative works by the Index of the Disappeared (Brooklyn-based artists...
moreThis essay examines contemporary South Asian diasporic feminist visual art practices in response to the U.S. military’s global carceral archipelago. I analyze collaborative works by the Index of the Disappeared (Brooklyn-based artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani) and solo works by Berlin-based American artist Rajkamal Kahlon, focusing on their aesthetic incorporation of declassified documents detailing widespread abuses in military practices of imprisonment, torture, and interrogation. Unlike the state’s quest for abstraction, the artists affix warmth, touch, and sound to otherwise “cold” data, thereby transforming the administrative violence of the security state into an imaginative alternative archive of the disappeared. In so doing, their archives of “warm data” conjure alternate modes of knowing and feeling how empire’s gendered-racialized others resist and reiterate the U.S. forever warfare.
Keywords:
US military imprisonment, forever war, indefinite detention, medical autopsies, torture, aesthetics of transparency, warm data, marbling, collage, South Asian diasporas, insurgent aesthetics, archives
