We Happy Few: Power and the Reification of Knowledge
The experience of disjuncture between my scepticism about knowledge production and the expectation of authentic empirical knowledge led me to engage with the power relations implicit in the reification of knowledge and its implications for artistic practice.
My response was to make We Happy Few: Your Lands. This comprises a view of a well-to-do domestic interior featuring a framed 1922 British-made map of Upper Mesopotamia, prominently featuring Baghdad. The area shown roughly corresponds to Baghdad Vilayet, whose inhabitants were addressed by General Sir Stanley Maude in 1917. It features a range of fiction books alluding to the re-enactment through fiction of western coloniality. It is dimly lit, suggestive of evening and, in relation to the other images in the triptych, an evocation of a time after action and, perhaps, of decline. The image showcases a range of objects that are suggestive of the process of the reification of knowledge, representative of the final goal of commodification: ownership. Having invited the viewer to bear witness to invasion and 'see' from my ideological perspective, they are now invited to enter a space in which knowledge of 'the Orient' is reduced to a reified object, a signification of the 'other' reduced to a safe, schematic system of knowledge, framed in terms of the colonial centre and quite literally simplified and domesticated.
The map in We Happy Few: Your Lands is framed in a traditional ornate gold frame (and below it, sits a simple pair of spectacles, a 'perspective' similarly framed in gold referring back to We Happy Few: The Vanity). Framing is an act of selection, a choice to make particular and illuminate through delimiting. Framing is required for 'seeing' in general and photography in particular. Yet it also traps within an ideological perspective and We Happy Few: Your Lands dramatises the treasuring of, and commitment to, this received and constrained perspective that comes with the nostalgia of the post-imperial society.