Alberta Pane Gallery is pleased to present Politics of the gaze, an exhibition by Scottish artist Gayle Chong Kwan, proposed in both spaces of the Paris gallery. This exhibition features for the first time in Paris works from two recent series: A pocket full of sand and Cyclops, both from 2024.

A pocket full of sand is a project that explores colonial narratives through the prism of geology. It highlights the historical and contemporary connections between the Isle of Mauritius, where the artist's father hails from, and the Isle of Wight, in England. A pocket full of sand includes photographs, sculptures, and a moving image work. The pieces depict sand-sculpted buildings that mimic Mauritius's colonial architecture, such as Aapravasi Ghat1, Adelaide Fort, a military structure, and Vagrant Depot, a prison for homeless workers.

Presented in the shape of grains of sand, archival footages from the 1940s and 50s offer the perspectives of two young boys with contrasting experiences: one appears in a film promoting tourism on the Isle of Wight, while the other other cuts sugar cane in Mauritius during British colonial rule, revealing the profound contradictions of history. Layers of time and geological strata are revealed through references to the coloured earth and sand in Mauritius and Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight.

Cyclops was commissioned by the Fondation Valmont in Venice. It invites us to reflect on visuality, ways of seeing historically, socially, and culturally constructed. It consists of a large photographic triptych that refers to Ulysses' encounter with Polyphemus, the giant, man-eating Cyclops, a metaphor for a limited vision and mind. It includes references to Greek mythology, cut-out historical images, as well as images created using artificial intelligence and virtual reality. The series also features several sculptures.

The most important takes the form of a large-scale wooden mobile made up of painted and printed collages of the eyes of female artists from different periods of art history, many of whom are little-known or unknown, by choice not to 'see' them. The other sculptures in printed fabric raise the question of non-human visuality. They are inspired by the legend of the Blemnyae or ‘headless men’, imaginary figures whose faces were in the centre of their torsos and whose Latin name means ‘looking from the middle’.

Although this two corpus of work come from very different contexts and fields of research, they share a common perspective on the political, environmental, and social consequences of how we 'view' the world.

Notes

1 This 1,640 m2 site in the Port Louis district is where the modern diaspora of indentured labourers began. In 1834, the British government chose Mauritius as the first site for its 'great experiment' of using free labour instead of slaves. Between 1834 and 1920, almost half a million indentured labourers from India arrived at the Aapravasi Ghat to work on the sugar plantations of Mauritius or to be transferred from there to Reunion Island, Australia, southern and eastern Africa and the Caribbean.