Peripheral Visiting

Decolonial perspectives on art history have elaborated on the ways visual representations and documentary media are intertwined with the colonial project. The visual regime is associated with the coloniser's Eurocentric, objectifying and territorialising gaze. Can the visual still play a part in healing colonial wounds? The Karrabing Collective, a majority Indigenous group based in the Northern Territories of Australia, seems to engage with this question. Studying their video art as a form of invitation, I question how these works address inhospitable zones in the imaginations of the modern world and settler-colonial legacies. Extending Donna Haraway's metaphor of visiting as a mode of ethical attention, I posit that these works destabilise Western understandings of hospitality, memory, and image-making. I argue that their re-visiting of settler-colonial encounters rejects the primacy of archival integration and access, inviting the viewer to visit the lived space of peripheral vision that shifts between remembering and re-imagining.