darkmatter Journal

In her first solo show, WESSIELING presented ‘Mapping Motifs: An exploratory journey through fashion, cities and identities’ at the AVA Gallery in London. The work comprised six Chinese dresses (qipao); otherwise identical, each dress had the fashionable streets of different fashion metropolises printed on the textile.

William Allan, The Slave Market, Constantinople, 1838, National Gallery of Scotland

Around about the time when digital torture porn from Abu Ghraib established racialised sadism and hardcore sexual violence as the aesthetic co-ordinates of contemporary western imperialism, someone…