Abstract: The second chapter considers the subversive images manifest in the work of Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, and Zineb Sedira. In their respective works, these artists present video images as performing narratives to question the imperial gaze. In this chapter, I build on Gayatri Spivak's concept of the native informant and Chela Sandoval's notion of topography to argue that the performative image of video technology can be unruly in relation to the dominant structure of representation. Placing Tan, Yalter, and Sedira in conversation, I also ponder how performative technology as methodology remembers or forgets history and undoes or scrolls through colonization and the coloniality of visual culture often transmitted by media technology.

Keywords: video, space, modulation, Fiona Tan, Nil Yalter, Zineb Sedira

This new cartography is best thought of not as typology, but as a topography of consciousness in opposition, from the Greek work topos or place, for it represents the charting of psychic and material realities that occupy a particular region. This cultural topography delineates a set of critical points within which individuals and groups seeking to transform dominant and oppressive powers can constitute themselves as resistant and oppositional citizen-subjects.