Independence Day 1936-1967; Maryam Jafri

Independence Day 1936-1967 features archival photos mainly from the first Independence Day ceremonies of various nations including Indonesia, India, Ghana, Senegal, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Vietnam (South), and Algeria. The first Independence Day, leading up to and including the formal ceremony, unfolds as a series of highly codified rituals and elaborate speech acts enacted across public and elite spaces. The swearing in of a new leadership, the signing of relevant documents, the VIP parade, the stadium salute, the first address to the new nation, is all supervised and orchestrated by the departing colonial power. The photographic material is strikingly similar despite disparate geographical and temporal origins as it reveals a political model exported from Europe and in the process of being cloned throughout the world. The photo installation emerges as a topology, poised somewhere between a grid and a script.

Special thanks: National Archives of Tanzania, Mohamed Kouaci Archives (Algeria), National Archives of Syria, National Archives of Malaysia, Teen Murti Archives (India), Ghana Ministry of Information, National Archives of Kenya, National Archives of Pakistan, Life Magazine (Senegal, Vietnam, Mozambique), Antara News Agency (Indonesia).

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Maryam Jafri (b. Karachi, Pakistan) is an artist working in video, photography and collage. Informed by a research based, interdisciplinary process, her artworks are often marked by a visual language poised between film and theater and a series of narrative experiments oscillating between script and document, fragment and whole. She holds a BA from Brown University and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

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