DIOR THIAM. Postcolonial Perspectives
The work of Dior Thiam, recipient of the Recognition Award of the STRABAG Artaward International 2025, revolves around a gaze we all know — yet rarely interrogate: the colonial gaze embedded in photography. Historical archival images may seem distant, but as Thiam points out, their visual logic extends far beyond their original moment. They continue to shape how bodies are seen, interpreted, and framed today, carrying the violence of their origins into the present.
For Thiam, engaging with these photographs is therefore a delicate, almost ritualistic undertaking. The original images — those “objects of violence,” as she calls them — are not materials she wishes to simply reuse. Her artistic practice begins with transformation: the shift from photograph to painting creates distance, allowing her to work through the image without reproducing its historical harm.
She gravitates toward pictures in which the photographed person disrupts the intended gaze — moments of resistance, refusal, or quiet defiance. From these images, she develops paintings that she repeatedly washes down and reworks. Washing becomes a gesture of release: an attempt to resist the seductive completion of a “beautiful image,” which risks stabilizing rather than questioning the power structures embedded in the source material.
Cutting, stitching, separating, rejoining — this second phase brings the work from representation back into a tactile, caring action. The threads remain visible, hanging loose like open questions or wounds that cannot be closed. “There is always something left over,” Thiam says, and this unresolved quality is essential to her practice: a refusal to offer clarity where history itself withholds it.
Her works demand movement. One must walk around them, step closer, step back. The fragmented perspectives make it impossible to grasp the image as a whole — because such wholeness does not exist. What emerges instead is a visual and political in-between space, in which Thiam does not provide answers but creates awareness.
In our short film, Dior Thiam speaks about this process, about care, resistance, and the question of how art can propose new ways of engaging with colonial archives. The exhibition “Before Ruins” from 14. November till 19. December 2025 at STRABAG ART shows how powerful and tender this search can become.
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