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Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

Articles Available Online


Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

The title of Paul Gauguin’s 1893-94 portrait Annah La Javanaise Aita tamari vahine Judith te parari has two parts, describing its subject in two different languages: literally, ‘Annah the Javanese [in French] The childwoman (sometimes child-girl) Judith has not been breached [in Tahitian]’ Relatively little is known of the real young person or people who inspired the painting The instances in which people – whether art historians, the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, or writers of art institution copy – have written of Annah contradict each other often, offering up vague and conflicting details of a supposedly insignificant life Annah’s ethnicity shifts, her origin ranges from ‘streets’ to ‘brothels’; I have seen the exact same picture of a girl labelled ‘Annah La Javanaise’ also labelled as ‘Teha’amana’, a Polynesian teenager who’d been married to Gauguin There is so much variation in accounts of her life that it’s plausible multiple brown children could have been mistaken for one For that matter, it’s possible that Annah was trans or of a non-Western gender, though presenting as a girl (and thus possibly desirous of ‘they’ as their pronoun in English) These children exist in the archives as an afterthought, an appendage to a coterie of white, European, male painters in late-nineteenth century France, primarily Paul Gauguin   I first learned of Annah La Javanaise in 2011 Today it is held in a private collection, inaccessible to the general public except when loaned out to museum exhibitions I discovered its existence online, and thus experienced it, as most people now do, as a series of pixels on a screen, a digital ghost of an artwork whose original form exists exclusively for its wealthy owners My first thought upon seeing the picture was that it showed a Javanese girl like myself; a body presenting and labelled as a Javanese woman – though in photographs in the Gauguin archives, a similar-looking girl certainly presents as a child – documented abroad in the nineteenth century, captured in both painted and photographic form This is rare to see At that time, I had begun to think increasingly about

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

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Prize Entry

April 2016

clerical error

Victoria Manifold

Prize Entry

April 2016

Due to a clerical error on my part, the current Prime Minister is now living in the box room...

Art

May 2013

On the Margins

Sean Smith

Art

May 2013

fiction

August 2013

How to Be an American

Will Heinrich

fiction

August 2013

Begin with a man on the beach. The sea is strangely iridescent, lighter in its lights and blacker in...

 

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