Becoming Opaque

Overview

Becoming Opaque exposes a shared visual language between former Dutch and Portuguese colonialists to create racial and gender stereotypes. Stitching together old propaganda films, ethnographic records, and home movies, Paula Albuquerque traces a lineage from earlier racial pseudoscience to Al-powered surveillance technologies. By programming a glitch, aspects of the image are deliberately obscured to protect the privacy of the subjects, who were filmed without their permission. The chairs in the exhibition space echo those of the footage showing an early twentieth century phrenologist* conducting studies in Sierra Leone, seen in her work.