In his book Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Ghasan Hage argues that the environmental breakdown we are experiencing today is rooted in colonial processes of geographical expansion, appropriation, overexploitation of nature and dehumanization of the other, past and present: “The practices of racial and ecological domination”, he writes, “have the same roots” (2017: ix). The title of the exhibition, In a Dim Light, alludes to the fragile visibility that falls onto, and emanates from, the bodies, objects and landscapes that have been destroyed by these processes, and that inhabit spectrally the museums of the present.
“Invisible histories”, so called, hover as occluded realities “behind” all we most easily see – stories of the efforts, lives and natural forces that have gone, unrecognised, into making the objects, landscapes, structures, and systems of our world. In fact, these stories and histories are not invisible. Everything leaves a trace, as Walter Benjamin reminded us. Nothing happens without leaving some mark, some effect in the entangled nature of being. It is simply that, while some things shout their presence, shine bright and grab our eye – like the magnificent glacier in its pristine form; the light bathes it and reflects to us in sparkling clarity – some are more obscured. By circumstance, or the role they play in a particular culture or mentality. And to see these, we need to search in the dim light. As our eyes become accustomed, we are no longer looking at discrete objects, but at their constellations – nuances of their wider story and historical processes.
