Anticolonialism can be understood as a tradition of thought and action; a transnational counter-politics enacted by peoples resisting the material conditions, structural legacies and ideologies that normalise empire. 

Anticolonial Ways of Seeing is the second iteration of ICF’s Shifting the Centre project. It considers the concept of ‘anticolonialism’ as a framework that allows clear links to be drawn between racialisation and capitalism, between past and present-day injustices, and local and global political struggles. The exhibition asks: is a contemporary anticolonial visual language possible? What are its concerns, reference points, and principles? What kinds of demands can it articulate? What sort of education can it provide? What histories does it draw from?

For the exhibition, publications from the Stuart Hall Library were placed into dialogue with a variety of materials found in iniva’s archive collection to build a series of constellations. Each constellation draws purposefully tenuous links between ideas, themes, and artistic interventions to posit traces of a shared history that transcend time, place, and rigid notions of racial and national identity. The material on display – exhibition ephemera, photographs, moving image, texts, excerpts from publications that have underpinned Shifting the Centre – were selected to explore how seemingly disparate ideas, mediums, commitments and histories might come together to constitute a cohesive visual language. 

Whether or not we are aware of it, any time we engage in the act of seeing (listening, reading, thinking, creating) we are drawing from epistemological traditions - ways of knowing and perceiving the world. The traditions we draw from can determine how we interact with history, how we engage in politics, and relate to our surroundings. Following on from the Shifting the Centre: Grenada as Reference exhibition at Black Cultural Archives, Anticolonial Ways of Seeing was an invitation to consider the relationship between politics and aesthetics, between anticolonialism – as a tradition of thought and action – and the visual arts.