Artist Statement
Already in my doctoral dissertation in cultural anthropology, photography played an important role in my research projects with indigenous peoples in Bolivia and Mexico. Yet, my approach to photography has undergone radical changes; I came to realize how photographs carry an elegiac dimension, embedded in the “thickness” of ordinary life. No longer limiting my work to serving as an appendage of salvage anthropology, I have come to interrogate photography in its representation of violence and assumed transparency. In and through my work I have come to question the transparency of photography by inserting stitches, tape, writing, or painting and therefore situate myself in post-photography debates over what counts as representation and the design of experimental approaches to the limitations of indexicality in photography.
Read the full statement here On the Migrant Image and the Violence of Photography
Artist Bio
Laurence Cuelenaere is an immigrant, cultural anthropologist, and artist. Her work examines the affective conditions of the (false)transparency of images. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. She has conducted long term ethnographic research with indigenous populations in both Mexico and Bolivia.