Sightlines, Ghosts, and Other Stories of the Impossible considers the afterlives of independence-era architecture as sites where past and present converge. Jess Atieno’s work approaches these forms as unstable and evolving, shaped by histories that remain present even as they shift.

Join us on April 7 for EXPO South Side Night, with extended gallery hours and light refreshments.

About the Artist

Jess Atieno’s (2023 Arts + Public Life Artist-in–Residence) practice engages African modernisms and visual culture through a postcolonial lens, critically examining the enduring imprint of colonial photographic practices on representations of place, home, and identity. Her research interrogates historic images, attending to their spectral presence and the ways they mediate memory, belonging, and dispossession.

Guided by artistic gestures that centre decolonized interpretations of history, Atieno makes time travels through history’s material remains such as photographs, maps and documents, incorporating them into the making of large screen prints and intricate woven tapestries. These acts of remediation do not merely reproduce these images but reanimate them, unsettling their fixity and opening them to new possibilities of meaning.

Atieno employs collage, fragmentation, and material manipulation as strategies to destabilize the photographic field, positioning her work sites of intervention. By engaging the screen print halftone and weaving binary code as visual registers, she constructs nuanced poetic narratives that resist the totalizing gaze of colonial photography. This process unfolds through a haptic collaboration between her body, the silk screen, and the loom— an embodied, multisensory negotiation that challenges the colonial logics of visibility and representation, ultimately proposing alternative ways of seeing and knowing.