Austin Martin White

For White, colonial image production is entangled with a contemporary collective memory as well as the reproduction of racist power dynamics. This play of references permeating throughout White’s artistic practice operates like active traces that continuously recur in the past and influence the present. Jacques Derrida termed this phenomenon hauntology in 1993. Through the concept of hauntology, the colonial past can be imagined as a ghost, a spectre, that haunts history, and can thus help perceive the persistence of today’s coloniality. For White, this concept holds the key to his archival research and its later decolonial and deconstructive undoing.