Jess Atieno maintains a practice informed by inquiries on place, home and dispossession through the lens of the post-colonial. Within this, she invokes and explores historical portraiture and contemporary iconography related to identity to understand the undertow of colonial photographic archives.
With this inspiration, Atieno time travels into history through its material remains: historical photographs, maps and documents, employing them in serigraphs and tapestries. Using collage and fragmentation as narrative tools, she makes effort to occupy the space beyond the visual field of the photograph. In this way, proposing new poetic readings that open up a haunting space with untold stories, independent of the archive.
In her chosen mediums, serigraphy and weaving engage the photograph as it is augmented and remediated by the halftone and binary code as new language. She constantly leans into these processes and gestures to complicate and destabilize the image to build it back together in a new register. These techniques further intersect with a haptic collaboration between her body and the physicality of the silk screen and loom in a multisensory corporeal engagement to apprehend and reproduce the image.
At the crossroads of the temporalities with history and material, Atieno questions the influence of photographic archives of colonial pasts on our present time. By revisiting and appropriating these images in herwork, Atieno develops a new language, in service of an alternative strategy of representation within the postcolonial.