Madhumita Nandi

This research emerged from an earlier inquiry into colonial archives through Koloniale Grüsse aus Samoa and deepened into a critical investigation of the enduring visual legacies of colonialism in the Pacific. Focusing on Samoa, Performativity of Gaze examines how colonial photography continues to shape representations of Indigenous lands, bodies, and ecologies in contemporary visual culture.

By tracing the spatial contexts, circulation, and contemporary responses to archival images particularly from German-Samoan communities, the project interrogates the layered power relations embedded in acts of seeing. It explores how different modes of gaze, rooted in colonial histories, still manifest today: in tourism, media, state institutions, and even within everyday encounters.

This thesis engages with questions of memory, cultural sovereignty, and resistance, offering a visual-ethnographic critique of how images can be both tools of domination and sites of potential disruption.v

Layers of different moments, memories, and histories were superimposed, intersecting, overlapping, and juxtaposing the contested narratives.

This visual intervention mapped the photograph, focusing both my own and the viewer’s gaze on the framed content. Emerging from my embodied experience, it re-performed the act of looking. The film was layered with my interlocutors’ responses, creating a dialogue between the visual and their narratives

This film allows the photograph to function as both object and subject, embodying my respondents' memories while engaging with its surroundings. It followed the colonial legacy of water—from a trade commodity to a symbol of neocolonial consumption in supermarkets, and ultimately, to an ethnographic museum object that reveals cultural and colonial complexities.

A visual represention of Tropical Islands site in Germany, connecting the research to recent cases with performers and the colonial legacies perpetuated during the Völkerschau (human zoos) era. This work exposes the artificial paradise of the resort, revealing the fantasies and illusions in its design and construction, and uncovering the underlying power dynamics and narratives.