Orientalismes

This book focuses on the series "Orientalismes" of the artist Romeo Mivekannin whose works create a theater, where the public is invited to replay history in its own way, to reappropriate the representations of which it may have been the object. The artist chooses to invite himself where he is not expected and to thwart the place that has been assigned to him. He breaks into the space of classical European painting, plastically through his self-portrait, symbolically through the reversal that this reinterpretation implies, from a suffered gaze to a chosen gaze. A text by Professor Gil Z. Hochberg accompanies the works, for a context and a better understanding of the series.

"In a similar manner to his earlier work and loyal to his signature style, Mivekannin uses this historical visual archive as his foundation. The so called 'Orientalist masterpieces' serve as the inspiration for his citational practice. In dialogue with and reference to these historical, western, colonial works, Mivekannin creates an alternative set of representations that violates and liberates. Under his brush, the Orientalist paintings undergo a radical transformation, even if at first sight this transformation seems gentle, subtle, or even unnoticed. The power of Mivekannin's work is found in the unique artistic manner by which he carefully and painstakingly mimics brutal and offensive colonial visual archives, while infusing them with difference. His mimicry is 'at once resemblance and menace.' Yet, Mivekannin's interest might in and critical activization of colonial western visual archives is not directed at the past, as one might expect. It is not focused on keeping a record of past atrocities. It returns to the past in an instrumental way, for the purpose of self-empowerment—psychological and political. The Orientalist artists are not the center of the work, but the citational reference upon which the artist creates a new anti-colonial visual archive for the present. "
Gil Z. Hochberg