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Partially Buried Continued (Green, Renée), 1997Thin Cities (Tan, Fiona), 2000Two Undiscovered Amerindians (Coco Fusco & Guillermo Gómez-Peña), 1992
 
 
 

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Post-colonial discourse, transculturality, translocal identities

«Post-colonial discourse,» writes Christian Kravagna, «begins at those moments when the political, theoretical or artistic definition of the relationship between ruler and ruled, between the dominant culture of the West and the dominated culture of the former colonies is not exclusively reserved for the side with power. The discourse takes place from the point at which the subjugated individuals gain access to the means of representation and are seen as subjects who can hold different perspectives up to the perspective of dominance.»[44] After documenta 9, in 1992, showed work by two African artists for the first time, it acquired its first African director, Okwui Enwezor, ten years later. In fact it has been possible to discern a (slowly) increasing overall presence for non-Western art production in the last ten years, something that had hitherto been ‹invisible› to the Western eye. Additionally, in the process of (economic) globalization, cultural identity has been replaced as a passively

 

accepted, uniform scheme by a productive, open practice that continually creates new identifications.

In this sense, theoreticians like Arjun Appadurai see ‹transculturality› as a process that produces a new cultural diversity—in contrast with the much-mentioned uniformity. «According to theory, transcultural fusion and overlapping lead to a constant flow of new identificatory subsets that can no more be reduced relative to each other than they can be separated from each other in principle. Partially overlapping subcultures are created, characterized as such by differences.»[45] Artists increasingly addressed these processes in the 1990s, like for example Renée Green in her video installation «Partially Buried Continued» (1997), and Fiona Tan in her video «Thin Cities» (2000). In the performance «Two Undiscovered Amerindians» (1992), Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez Peña put themselves on show in a cage as two representatives of a hitherto undiscovered species of native American. Post-colonial problems are also addressed explicitly in works by Shirin Neshat

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