Papers by Miranda Pennell
This practice-led research looks at the ways in which the colonial archive, and the colonial phot... more This practice-led research looks at the ways in which the colonial archive, and the colonial photographic archive in particular, can be reconstructed to produce new critical histories. The research argues for the potential of the moving image as a tool for re-staging colonial archives, as a means of generating responsible ways of looking at, and of engaging with our troubled collective pasts. In my practice I mix the photographic archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company(which became BP) with my family’s photographs from Iran, and with the documentation and narrativization of my encounter with both of these sets of materials, within the moving image. Through this process I address questions about the nature of the photographic archive and the search for historical meaning within it; the question of the researcher’s position within the archive and within the history she produces; and I investigate the affective power of colonial photographs within film and the experience of untimeline...
The International Journal of Screendance, 2019
No abstract availableThis article was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the U... more No abstract availableThis article was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, as part of The International Journal of Screendance, Volume 2 (2012), Parallel Press. It is made available here with the kind permission of Parallel Press.
Media Practice and Education, 2019
This paper examines how the colonial archive, and the colonial photographic archive in particular... more This paper examines how the colonial archive, and the colonial photographic archive in particular, can be repurposed within the moving image to produce new, critical histories. Taking my reworking of images from the BP archive as a starting point, I consider the ways in which archival appropriation produces an order of historical meaning that registers through affect and the experiential. I combine observations of my own experience of looking at colonial photographs with reflections on the ambiguous temporal status of archival images, and I transpose Raymond Bellour's seminal text The Pensive Spectator (2007) to the context of colonial representation. I show how the dynamic between various actorsthe photographic subject, the hidden figure of the photographer, the archivist, the filmmaker and a contemporaneous film viewer, can be made palpable through the merging of still and moving images. I propose that the moving image has the power to continually re-position the viewer in relation to the archival photograph, its subject, and to the past it purports to represent. I argue that this uprooting of the viewer offers a potent way of engaging with our troubled collective pasts, and in so doing, models an ethics of remembrance.
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Papers by Miranda Pennell