alejandro t. acierto is an artist, musician, and curator whose work is largely informed by legacies of colonialism found within human relationships to technology and material cultures. He has exhibited and performed projects for the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas (Cuba), the Film Society of Lincoln Center (NYC), Radialsystem (Berlin), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MCA Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, the KANEKO (Omaha), and Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival (Chicago). Recent curatorial projects have been presented at Vanderbilt University (Nashville), Coop Gallery (Nashville), and online for the Wrong Biennial.
acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, and Digital Artist Residency. A 3Arts Awardee, he received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and was an inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Digital Art and New Media and a Mellon Faculty Fellow in Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University.
“These matters of possession” is an interventionist project of digital harm reduction, a two-part project where I invest in the removal of violent material culture found online through auction sites and use it as source material to produce lens-based performance works, (alternative) material cultures and ephemera, and databases that open conversations around the entanglements of networked culture, tourism, prisons, and image technologies.
Focused on ephemera made during the US colonial occupation of the Philippines in the early 20th century, this project scans online retailers for images, objects, and ephemera that continue to sustain multiple formations of Pilipinx constraint, in what Catherine Ceniza Choy refers to as “corporeal colonization”, and remove them from the online marketplace through purchase. As image-objects that normalize the consumption of violent histories and spaces, ones developed under white supremacist values of settler-colonial possession, this project of removal continues the work of what Neema Githere calls “data healing” to respond to the “compounded effects of navigating digital infrastructures created to exploit, categorize, and discard personhood.” While material cultures of Pilipinx constraint are suspended indefinitely in servers online as digital images, they live in the purgatories of search results and haunt our queries with jpegs of abjection. While retailers are frequently unaware of these violent histories, they inadvertently contribute to the circulation of these formations of constraint through the digital imaging process needed to authenticate the objects as part of any online sale. In the project of reclamation and repossession of this material culture from the trappings of online circulation, I want to have the ability to shape how these images are used in the future and build different models for engagement through the screen.
To reclaim these histories, I have begun to create images and performances for the camera – or in this case, the scanner bed – where I am mindful of the humans often excluded from the labor of imaging. As caretakers for these objects bound for digital transformation, the image of the hand begins to pull back the fourth wall, shaping how the image of the object is read, shifting the context altogether. No longer a singular object of study, the hand intervenes on historical anthropological practices that placed objects within neutral-toned settings for the sake of categorization and identification, further complicating the frame and focus of intention. In some ways, the hand becomes a different kind of metric, an alternative method of calibration that traces an object with its impact upon the body. In layering objects as assemblages that redact or obscure the violent content of the images purchased, I can construct a different kind of narrative to reveal broader networks of power that sustain today. Made in parallel with the movement for the removal of racist monuments in public space and with calls to end the circulation of mediated spectacles of Black death, this project extends the work of data healing through removal and recontextualization. It insists on locating other strategies for the futures of digital harm reduction while speculating alternatives for critical engagements with history.
in caring for horrific pasts, part of these matters of possession, archival inkjet print /.jpg, 12″x15″, 2020
“in caring for horrific pasts” is a work that gestures to the archival caretakers and speculates on ways history can be kept without inflicting harm. This particular object held by the gloved hand is part of a series of 8 postcards depicting the same event in a prison yard in a southern island in the Philippines. In many ways, it shares a parallel history and aesthetic to the lynching postcards that permeated the continental US at the same time. Noting these recurrent themes between racialized images across the Pacific allows for a broader, more nuanced understanding of the formations of militarized aggression and narratives of possession. Images like these remind us of the colonial legacy entangled in contemporary prison systems while refusing to engage in the sensationalization of Black and Brown death. Critical to this work, seen here with the hand, is to develop strategies for viewers to understand these complex histories without needing to experience violence without consent.
Index (working title), from these matters of possession, archival inkjet print /.jpg, 16″x20″, 2020
Excerpted from the series “these matters of possession”, this image offers an initial contextualization of the source material from which all of the other images emerge. Noting how colonial images have and continue to do violence on people of colonized ancestry, this work highlights the entanglements of tourism within diasporic images. By reifying racialized tropes of savagery or reiterating power through images of militarized control and identification, image-objects such as these postcards helped establish the racial matrix of of posession, further justifying the project of manifest destiny. While these relics were made a century ago, they still manage to hold a peculiar power as they are able to continue to inflict harm, particularly as they permeate and circulate within auctions sites such as ebay. Thus, to turn over the front of the postcard is to refuse the harmful impact of its content while offering viewers a context under which to understand their existence.
yet untitled [eBay listing], ongoing performance, 2020-ongoing
As part of this ongoing work, I have turned to the site of circulation directly by refiguring the images of picture postcards purchased on eBay and have begun to redistributing them in the same ways they were sourced. Interrupting the feedback loop of continual sales that profit from Brown death, I instead offer curious consumers images of refusal that appear original but are otherwise digitally processed images. No longer imaged or captured, sought after moments of execution are covered, removed, displaced and transformed (in custom software) and printed on cardstock paper similar to their original counterparts. As interruptions on the materiality of constraint, these newly devised “picture postcards” gesture to the originals without allowing the viewer the capacity of a colonial gaze. Enacting a proactive form of digital harm reduction whereby consumers may be disuaded from future purchases of this material, this work ideally begins to complicate collectors’ intention to collect.
current workspace image
I’ve had to rethink how I approach making and what my relationship is to material objects in relation to digital projects. With so many exhibitions and spaces migrating to online platforms, I had to really spend more time thinking through the logistics of file sizes, web-compatible formats, and the extent to which viewers would be able to experience the work.