Art History Lecture | Teddy Perkins

Image: Flinders University, still image from Natalie Harkin’s “Archive Fever Paradox 2 Whitewash Brainwash, 2014.” YouTube video. 3:12. 6 Nov 2014.

Master’s candidate in art history Teddy Perkins will present the lecture “Weaving (m)others: Discursive Aporia and Spectropoetic Irruptions in Natalie Harkin’s Archive Fever Paradox 2 Whitewash Brainwash.”

Lecture Abstract

Natalie Harkin’s Archive Fever Paradox 2 Whitewash Brainwash (2014) uses the medium of video to display a basket which was made as a part of her Archival Poetics series. The basket, woven from torn and twisted strips of the letters Harkin’s great-grandmother wrote in response to the state-sanctioned trafficking of her eight-year-old daughter, demonstrates how obfuscation, omission, and instrumentalization are essential qualities of colonial archives. By placing Harkin’s video into dialogue with Derrida’s concept of hauntology, Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, and Deleuze’s concept of the fold, this proposal explores how Harkin dislodges the idea of the archive as something static. Harkin’s video gives voice to the archive’s silences, erasures, and distortions and invites viewers to consider the ways in which the archive’s effect will either reify existing power structures or rectify historical injustices. By illuminating the complexity of the structures that build collective memory, Harkins challenges viewers to question dominant narratives, expand their historical consciousness, and think critically about the stories—and lack of stories—that influence their understanding of the world.