Papers by Jaimey Hamilton Faris
Feminist Review, 2022
This article engages weaving as a model of feminist decolonial climate justice methodology in Oce... more This article engages weaving as a model of feminist decolonial climate justice methodology in Oceania. In particular, it looks to three weaver-activists who use their practices to reclaim the matrixial power of the ocean (as maternal womb and network of relation) in the face of ongoing US occupation in the Pacific: Marshallese poet and climate activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner; Hawai'i-based settler-ally weaver and installation artist Mary Babcock; and Kanaka Maoli sculptor Kaili Chun, also based in Hawai'i. Each artist begins from a particular positionality in the ongoing open weave of the ocean and uses specific cultural ontologies of weaving and netting to address knots and gaps in climate change imaginaries. These weavers help to articulate important nuances in recent calls for working in solidarity networks at the cultural interface of climate justice activism. Their processes directly address the need for greater emotional and relational capacity across cultural and national divides, across Indigenous and non-Indigenous feminist critiques of colonial-capitalist systems and through interconnected waters.
Pacific Arts, 2021
This article describes Sāmoan-Australian artist Angela Tiatia’s performance video Lick (2015) as
... more This article describes Sāmoan-Australian artist Angela Tiatia’s performance video Lick (2015) as
an act of Pacific Islander survivance. Recorded in and with the coastal waters of Tuvalu, the work
emphasizes a direct and responsive encounter with the Pacific Ocean. The video’s intentional
emphasis on Tiatia’s malu, a tattoo specific to Sāmoan women, and her choregraphed leg and
hand gestures of balance represent a powerful visual proclamation of Tiatia’s Oceanic feminist
relationship with the ocean. Her performance is an important challenge to the exotifying
impulses of environmental documentaries and mainstream media that often represent Pacific
Islanders as passive victims of sea level rise. In the context of current decolonizing performance
literature and practices in Oceania, Lick is read as a strategic hydrochoreography—an embodied
art practice that expresses the lively interconnection of body-ocean rhythms needed to sustain
Indigenous futures.
Shima, 2019
The video poem Rise: From One Island to Another, a 2018 collaboration between Marshallese poet Ka... more The video poem Rise: From One Island to Another, a 2018 collaboration between Marshallese poet Kathy Jetn̄ il-Kijiner and Inuk poet Aka Niviâna from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) raises key questions about the antimonies of climate mitigation and adaptation discourses across oceans and islands. As "sisters of ocean and ice," the poets reference the climate relationships between ice melt in Greenland and sea inundation of the Marshall Islands as part of the extended, but differentiated, island colonial histories of occupation, militarism, and development. Having been brought together by environmental activist organisation 350.org, Jetn̄ il-Kijiner and Niviâna also strategically use their positionalities as Indigenous islanders to critique not only the continuity between colonial and neo-liberal operations but also the continuity between colonial and environmental scopic regimes, that taken together, stymie climate change imaginaries. In response to these discourses, they claim a feminist hydro-ontological imaginary. Ultimately, the video poem allows an examination of the value of materialist hydro-feminisms and "feminism without borders" (Mohanty, 2003) to extend Island Studies frameworks of the aquapelagic-the assemblage of human interactivity with sea, land, and sky.
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas
The following remarks are edited from an onsite interview and a public dialogue at the University... more The following remarks are edited from an onsite interview and a public dialogue at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa on March 12, 2017. The exchanges were organized by the art historians Jaimey Hamilton Faris and Margo Machida to offer an opportunity for Hawaiʻi-born artists Sean Connelly and Lynne Yamamoto to discuss their new sculptural works for the inaugural Honolulu Biennial 2017, Middle of Now|Here (March 8–May 8, 2017). Both artists installed their work at the Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu
Our Ocean Guide is a volume edited by Map-Office and Lightbox Publishing in conjunction with the... more Our Ocean Guide is a volume edited by Map-Office and Lightbox Publishing in conjunction with the Venice Biennale 2017. I curated the section on Hawai'i. As an introduction to the section, I wrote "Double Sunsets" explores the ramifications of containerization in Hawaii - the history of Matson, the islands' dependence on food and energy, and more.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual …, 2004
ARTMargins, 2015
This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the ... more This introduction charts the emergence of the term Capitalist Realism at the intersection of the international postwar art movements of Pop, Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, happenings, and Anti-Art. It relates the independent coinage of Capitalist Realism by artists Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Manfred Kuttner in Germany in May 1963 with that of artist Akasegawa Genpei Japan in February 1964 and argues that they were both part of a broader interest in developing new strategies of artistic realism during the Cold War. The artists' sly and ironic appropriations of consumer objects and advertisements sought to capture the operations of capitalism, not only as an economy, but as an ideology that materially and systemically reproduces itself within everyday life. Relating the Cold War moment to the development of capitalism after the fall of the communist bloc, the introduction ends by addressing the strategic applicability of Capitalist Realist modes to contemporary art...
Part of the mid-eighties New Wave movement in China, which includes the likes of Xu Bing and Wend... more Part of the mid-eighties New Wave movement in China, which includes the likes of Xu Bing and Wenda Gu, Ni Haifeng is one of the most daring and explicit of that generation to deal with the history of China’s embrace of capitalism. After immigrating to The Netherlands in the mid-nineties, his work shifted away from Nonsense Calligraphy (a hallmark of the New Wave movement), and began focusing on complex historical circulations of people and goods, as well as the issues of authorship, copyright, and value that arise from trade history. In Of the Departure and the Arrival (2005), for instance, he played off the material history of Delftware, asking the citizens of Delft to contribute contemporary household objects to be copied in blue-and-white porcelain by a factory in Jingdezhen. These objects were then packed and transported back to Delft and exhibited in a display that included their shipping cartons. This piece opened up multiple avenues of investigation regarding China’s position in the global economy, resulting in one of Ni’s most famous installations, Para-production, which focused on the invisibility of Chinese labor and the sheer material weight of the global apparel manufacturing. First shown at Joyart Gallery in Beijing in 2008, it has since been included in The Global Contemporary (2011), at ZKM Karlsruhe, and The Deep of the Modern, Manifesta 9 (2012), in Genk, Belgium. Ni has also recently turned his attention to the consumer economy of art with the projects In Search of a Perfect Equation (2010) and Reciprocal Fetishism (2010), and Things Themselves (2013). Moving fluidly from the history of Dutch collections to the contemporary craze of Contemporary Chinese Art, Ni positions our present fascination for objects within a larger meditation on the desires that drive such economies.
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Papers by Jaimey Hamilton Faris
an act of Pacific Islander survivance. Recorded in and with the coastal waters of Tuvalu, the work
emphasizes a direct and responsive encounter with the Pacific Ocean. The video’s intentional
emphasis on Tiatia’s malu, a tattoo specific to Sāmoan women, and her choregraphed leg and
hand gestures of balance represent a powerful visual proclamation of Tiatia’s Oceanic feminist
relationship with the ocean. Her performance is an important challenge to the exotifying
impulses of environmental documentaries and mainstream media that often represent Pacific
Islanders as passive victims of sea level rise. In the context of current decolonizing performance
literature and practices in Oceania, Lick is read as a strategic hydrochoreography—an embodied
art practice that expresses the lively interconnection of body-ocean rhythms needed to sustain
Indigenous futures.
an act of Pacific Islander survivance. Recorded in and with the coastal waters of Tuvalu, the work
emphasizes a direct and responsive encounter with the Pacific Ocean. The video’s intentional
emphasis on Tiatia’s malu, a tattoo specific to Sāmoan women, and her choregraphed leg and
hand gestures of balance represent a powerful visual proclamation of Tiatia’s Oceanic feminist
relationship with the ocean. Her performance is an important challenge to the exotifying
impulses of environmental documentaries and mainstream media that often represent Pacific
Islanders as passive victims of sea level rise. In the context of current decolonizing performance
literature and practices in Oceania, Lick is read as a strategic hydrochoreography—an embodied
art practice that expresses the lively interconnection of body-ocean rhythms needed to sustain
Indigenous futures.
In each chapter, Hamilton Faris introduces artists who exemplify the focus of readymade aesthetics on aspects of global commodity culture, including consumption, marketing, bureaucracy, labor, and community. She explores how materially intensive, “uncommon” aesthetic situations can offer moments to meditate on the kinds of objects, experiences, and values we ostensibly share in the age of globalization.
This book was initiated by the Banff Research in Culture Group at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity led by Imre Szeman and Eva-Lynn Jagoe in the Summer of 2018. Its publication is generously supported by Future Energies System research project at University of Alberta.
"This spring, the Honolulu Biennial made its debut on the global art stage with a multi-venue, two-month-long exhibition featuring both established and emerging Pacific artists—including a contingent of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Hawai‘i-based artists. The exhibition also included a number of Southeast Asian artists, a few East Asian art stars, and two Middle-East-based artists, giving a first impression that the exhibition sought to emulate the “expanded regionalism” of the now well-established Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland, Australia). Yet, at least for this first iteration, there was a clear curatorial focus on the importance of Pacific contemporary art."