Visual Cultures as Time Travel proposes a notion of time travel in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery and in the moment of mass illegalized migration, of wildfires and floods, of lost and co-opted futures.
With its capacity to unsettle our sense of the temporal—through montage, doublings, hauntings—visual culture can enable a sense, or theory, of time travel. It invites us to consider the visual outside the realm of art, and to think beyond the technocratic and colonial tropes of science fiction. It can send us tumbling through deep space, into the past, or toward other speculations.
Visual Cultures as Time Travel proposes a notion of time travel in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery and in the moment of mass illegalized migration, of wildfires and floods, of lost and co-opted futures. Ayesha Hameed recounts her travels to islands in the Caribbean Sea and off the coast of Finland to study how geologic and revolutionary time are produced through the violent dispossession of the current climate emergency and the history of the slave trade. Henriette Gunkel examines time travel in relation to blackness and vertigo as set out in Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred and Kitso Lynn Lelliott's multimedia installation South Atlantic Hauntings. These works suggest a nonnormative approach to seeing and experiencing the world, and turn our attention to the body as the technological device for traveling across and through time.
Media and
postcolonial scholar Henriette Gunkel is Professor of Transformations of Audiovisual Media with special emphasis on gender and queer theory at the Institute for Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum.
Artist and writer Ayesha Hameed's work explores contemporary borders and migration, critical race theory,
Walter Benjamin, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic.
