Bettina Malcomess/Anne Historical: Sentimental Agents

About

In her exhibition "Sentimental Agents" she traces the historical developments of media technologies and how they shape our cultural unconscious. How do our most intimate and early childhood encounters with visual and sonic technologies, both of recording and transmission, define our historical awareness? At what point do we form images of the histories we encounter through museums, archives, books, series, school curricula, or the family genealogies and albums that engender our deepest social connections to nation, to class, to race, to gender. How do we remember the news? Can history enter our nervous systems in the same way as sensations and impulses? Are networks, webs and the viral already encoded in our understandings of the body?

In a series of analogue and digital films, the character Anne Historical plays a narcoleptic technician of history, journeying to sites of the South African War, to the remains of the racially divided cinema palaces of apartheid and colonial Ghana, to museums, monuments and archives tracking the entanglement of cinema, media and violence, an archeology of empire's nervous system. Here Anne and the camera itself are the sentimental agents, unreliable witnesses in search of the lost films that never entered the archive: the film returned to nitrate, to ash, to soil, to dust. Despite their attempts to queer the archive, the somnolent agent finds themselves complicit in these violent histories, caught within field of the frame and the apparatus.