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Abstract
This essay examines the artist project by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, Index of the Disappeared (2004-present), focusing on how the project entwines studio, research, and long-term site-responsive methodologies. It argues that the project’s use of portraiture and alignment with radical archival practice offers methods for counteracting the antisociality of profiling, its sundering of kin and practices of capture. By way of the term antiprofile, the essay argues that Index of the Disappeared nourishes nourish life and sociality against racialized control, by producing new relationships between persons, their portraits, and profiles amidst the depersonalizing cultures of spectacle and security that have long targeted black and brown life before and after 9/11.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani for their generosity during the research process, and for the images. My thanks also to the editorial contributions of Kim Bobier, Marisa Williamson, the Women & Performance editorial collective and two anonymous reviewers for recommendations that substantially improved this essay.
2 These powers include imbuing “the INS [now Immigration and Customs Enforcement] with the power to arrest, detain and deport unauthorized immigrants while significantly curtailing, and in certain circumstances eliminating, immigrant rights to appeal the decision” (Douglas and Sáenz Citation2013, 205).
3 “Forms of racism instituted and active at the level of perception tend to produce iconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable. The differential distribution of grievability across populations has implications for why and when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, aguilt, righteous sadism, loss and indifference” (Butler Citation2010, 24).
4 In Browne’s words, “For example, what Lyon calls “digital discrimination” signals this differential application of surveillance technologies, where “flows of personal data—abstracted information—are sifted and channelled in the process of risk assessment, to privilege some and disadvantage others, to accept some as legitimately present and to reject others” (Citation2015, 21).
5 In 1972, the FBI established a Behavioral Science Unit in its headquarters in Virginia that would produce theories and categories of offenders and crime scene analysis that after 1980 would become increasingly widely used. For example, see articles by BSU Special Agents Ault and Reese (Citation1980), Casey-Owens (Citation1984), Rider (Citation1980), and Rizzo (Citation1980).
6 Copeland describes the body’s “flight from the representational frame” to refuse wholeness, resemblance and frontality. Copeland describes the production surrogates for Black embodiment – in art by Glenn Ligon and others employing found objects and commodities of slavery – as antiportrait approaches to Black embodiment in response to the fungibility of blackness as a historic commodity (Citation2013, 9–11).
7 See Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers Birthplace and Residence Profile Part I (1969) at the Howard Wise Gallery on New York’s 57th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues; Gallery Goers’ Residence Profile, Part 2 (1970) at Galerie Paul Maenz, Cologne; John Weber Gallery Visitor’s Profile 1 (1972); and John Weber Gallery Visitor’s Profile 2 (1972).
8 Chitra Ganesh, Email to Author, March 14, 2020.
9 Chitra Ganesh, Email to Author, March 14, 2020.
10 It is described as comparable to works such peers as Ahmed Basiony and Trevor Paglen, addressing “issues such as human rights violations, “black sites” of clandestine operations and cases of discrimination in the name of national security” (Bhadana Citation2016, 95).
11 As Ganesh put it, “Persistence is also a key part of it—being open and going to meetings again and again to make the connections. Also continuing to enter activists’ domains, rather than exclusively inviting people into our spaces or networks. And since it’s an exchange over a period of time, its not like we have to go crazy going to twenty-five meetings a week for three weeks before we organize” (Ashford et al. Citation2006, 47–48).
12 Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, “Tracing the Index: 4 Discussions, 4 Venues” program brochure. Hosted and co-sponsored by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYU’s Kevorkian Institute, The New School’s Vera List Center for Art + Politics, Art in General. March 2–March 31, 2008. Events included: Collaboration + Feminism at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (March 2); Impossible Archives at the Kevorkian Center, NYU (March 3); Collaboration and Context at Art in General (March 26) Agency and Surveillance (The New School, March 31).
13 See Foster et al. (Citation1994, 11–22), Meyer (Citation1996, 20–29), Graw (Citation1990, 137).
14 The Visible Project has also been represented in Index of the Disappeared zines and resource collections. On the tensions of keying works to political conditions rather than the timing or demands of museums and art institutions, see Mohaiemen’s remarks in Ashford and Mohaiemen (Citation2008). The Visible Collective has included Naeem Mohaiemen, Ibrahim Quraishi, Anandaroop Roy, Jee-Yun Ha, Donna Golden, Aimara Lin, Vivek Bald, Kristofer Dan-Bergman, JT Nimoy, Sehban Zaidi, Anjali Malhotra, Aziz Huq, Sarah Olson.
15 Conversation with Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, March 19, 2020.
16 Chitra Ganesh, Email to Author, March 14, 2020.
17 Chitra Ganesh, Email to Author, March 14, 2020.
18 Chitra Ganesh, Email to Author, March 14, 2020.
19 In doing so, I refer to contemporary aesthetics theories that have notably expanded the poles of modern figure-ground relations. For instance, in mounting a case for the modernist primacies of surface, Rosalind Krauss famously substituted a Klein group’s many positions to dispute the primacy of the figure/ground opposition, suggesting the figure might not only appear against a field (or be defined in relationship to it) but otherwise ingest that field too (Krauss Citation1993, 14). In another context, David Joselit more recently extended figure-ground relations to a techno-political field, by proposing televisual space as ground, and with work in video by artists as figuration upon it. Or, in his words addressing critical video experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, “art stands against television as figure stands against ground, and television, in its privatization of public speech and its strict control over access to broadcasting, stands against democracy” (Joselit Citation2007, xi.)
20 Foster’s writings have been cited by Ghani, with regards to the imminent threat of disaster that all archives face, “perhaps, like the Library of Alexandria, any archive is founded on disaster (or its threat), pledged against a ruin that it cannot forestall. (2004, 5) quoted (Ghani Citation2015, 43).
21 In his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin notably argues for a relationship to history as resuscitating fragments of the past in a moment of danger when these become necessary. See Benjamin (Citation1973).
22 Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, “Tracing the Index: 4 Discussions, 4 Venues” program brochure. Hosted and co-sponsored by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYU’s Kevorkian Institute, The New School’s Vera List Center for Art + Politics, Art in General. March 2–March 31, 2008. Events included: Collaboration + Feminism at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (March 2); Impossible Archives at the Kevorkian Center, NYU (March 3); Collaboration and Context at Art in General (March 26) Agency and Surveillance (The New School, March 31).
23 Email from Mariam Ghani, March 19, 2020.
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Jeannine Tang
Jeannine Tang is an art historian teaching as Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Interim Program Director of Visual Studies at The New School, New York.