Where to Look (?)

Bypassing Hegemony of Knowledge with Installation-Exhibitions from Fareed Armaly and Renée Green

Abstract

The article explores how artists and occasional curators Fareed Armaly and Renée Green’s installations challenge the dominant Eurocentric paradigms of knowledge through the medium of exhibition. Situating their works within the second wave of Institutional Critique, from New York to Cologne, it then details the way in which they offer two very different takes on exhibition setting through the display of documents and objects they propose. Contextualizing the two works within a shared skepticism towards Western epistemology noted by Homi K. Bhabha in the early 1990s, the paper argues that both installations enact a form of “epistemic disobedience” as conceptualized by Walter D. Mignolo by revealing the biases of institutional knowledge production and offering alternative frameworks for understanding cultural history. Through spatial and conceptual strategies, Armaly and Green demonstrate how exhibitions can function as sites of resistance, reshaping the ways knowledge is constructed and disseminated beyond dominant discourses.