Adua

About

The exhibition, the title of which means 'I don’t know' in the Embera language, will present a series of mixed-media works including photography, textile pieces, and works on paper from the artists’ ongoing collaboration. Together, their work explores the intersections of identity, ritual, and healing. In adopting photography, Biswell confronts the medium’s colonial legacies and the anthropological tendencies of photographic portraiture. Adua will present a suite of portraits, made by the artist over the last fifteen years, of members of the Embera-Chami community. Reimagining the analogue process of converting film negatives into a positive print, Biswell works with the negative to create vivid images that remain incomplete or indeterminable. In doing so, the artist seeks to reveal the inherent disparity in the taxonomic approach of ethnographical portraiture, and the polemics of an appropriation of ‘the Other’ into Western traditions.