Gaze: Utterance

Gaze: Utterance explores the intimate conversations and works developed during the Gaze: Oral/Written workshop led by artist Jennifer Martin. This is an opportunity to publicly discuss the project, which queries the site where epidermis, vision and apparatus meet. Martin will be in conversation with Dhanveer Singh Brar, Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures, at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The Gaze project encompasses a series of workshops which directly engage with histories of racialised representation. Working collectively, the artist and participants seek to disturb visibility and find approaches to impeding an inherently racialised sight. Together, they approach the question of how one refutes racist typologies governed by sight while working with the visual. The workshop process engages with testimony, discussion and creative working on methods of representation.  

The Gaze: Oral/Written workshop focuses on the oration of ancestral narratives and exercises in writing self-reflexively about the subjectivities of others. Utilizing a range of materials and tools, participants are prompted to navigate the ways in which ancestral knowledge is passed down and how information can be mutated over time through multiple iterations.  

Gaze is generously supported by the Durham Wharf Foundation through ReachOutRCA, the Royal College of Art engagement programme.

Jennifer Martin is a London-based fine artist and writer. She is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art and currently studies MA Photography at the Royal College of Art. Martin is keenly concerned with the potential and potency of photography, as well as the dupable expectation for accuracy and neutrality.

Martin’s recent work centres primarily on photography's role in the construction of race, which she explored through her master’s thesis One Drop, One Touch: What if Means to Burn, and the critical disarming of nostalgia found in audience-geared photographic staging, approached in the project Full of Loops and developed during the Chisenhale Art Place’s 2017 Studio4 Summer Residency.

Dhanveer Singh Brar is a scholar of Black Studies, as it intersects with Cultural Studies, Sound Studies and Critical Theory. The research he undertakes covers theorizations of Black diasporic sonic culture from the mid-twentieth century to the present and the politics of Black critical thought. At present he is working on a book manuscript analysing electronic dance music, urban geography and sonic ecologies in the contemporary diaspora of the Global North. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures, at Goldsmiths, University of London.