Petersen is a multi-disciplinary artist whose discourses focus on photographic ‘self-portraits’, installations and multi-sensory based performance. Her work has been a journey through her Muslim, Cape Malay, South African, and Indonesian past, with the hope of constructing a better future by taking back what has been robbed from her culture – heritage, history, pride, self-worth and dignity.
Bikoro’s visual practice is, in fact, an organic and consequential research of modes of remembering, recollecting, rewriting, rethinking and reshaping histories and temporalities. Each performative gesture, each written or spoken word, installation or moving image taking part into the artist’s polyhedral research, is just a segment of a dense apparatus of references and correspondences.
“Filmmaking arrived in Africa with the intended function of ‘civilising’ the African population. The way that they would do this was through the introduction of western norms and ideals portrayed in film, which was a simultaneous strategy of erasure and dismissal of African existence as this exotic and superstitious experience. The role of film in this sense was a way to render our own stories useless to us.”
He uses comedy to shine a light on the seedy aspects of modern Kenyan life. Those who do not pay attention to his message and those who cannot digest the satire tend to misconstrue his motives.
From October, 4th 2016 to January, 15th 2017, the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac in Paris presented The Color Line: African-American artists and segregation. The exhibition concluded with an exciting day and half symposium bringing together eminent specialists in American art.