deSouza, 2010 C-Print 16″ x 12″ (From The Third Eye Series)
Throughout their career, deSouza has engaged with historical events, works of literature, and cultural figures, which provoke a reexamination of seemingly central cultural values, often embraced by their sharp sense of wit. deSouza has also explored, poetically, their personal but universal notions of time, aging and death and how memory and photography are both formed and transformed over time, and at times allowing even the coexisting of our past and present.
Frequently hovering between figuration and abstraction, subjectivity and neutrality, the real and the fictional, deSouza’s works excavate historical, cultural, and ideological constructs, examining the relationship between narratives of collective identity, individual experience and art history.
Entry, 2010-11 Color photograph 12″ x 16″ (From The World Series)
"My personal interests are less in constructions of what “African” art might be and more in the questions they pose and the omissions they expose in the “architecture” of global contemporary art and its formation through Eurocentric discourses. These are some of the larger projects which the “undisciplined” needs to infiltrate, not to form new disciplines or reform existing ones of the “African,” but to un-‐discipline our understandings of the global contemporary; and not only to unmoor them from xenophobic and nationalist formations, but to reframe them as localized and translocal artistic practices."
Al-An deSouza
Al-An deSouza’s works have been exhibited extensively including at The Pompidou Centre, Paris; Museum Kunst Palast, Germany; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Mori Art Museum, Japan; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Hayward Gallery, UK; International Center of Photography, NY; Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands; Museo Tamayo, Mexico; Memphis Brooks Museum, TN; Museum for African Art, NY; Smithsonian Museum, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; 3rd Guangzhou Triennale, China; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF; Fowler Museum, LA; Blaffer Art Museum, TX; and Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL. In 2011, on an invitation by The Phillip’s Collection, deSouza created The World Series in response to Lawrence’s Migration Series, and their work was subsequently featured in a solo exhibition at the museum along with Lawrence’s works.
deSouza was born in 1958 in Nairobi, Kenya to immigrant parents of Indian descent and grew up in the United Kingdom. In 1983, they graduated from the Bath Academy of Fine Art, England with a BA in Fine Art (Honors). From 1993-1994 they pursued Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program in New York, USA. They obtained their MFA in Photography from UCLA, California, USA in 1997.
They live and work in the Bay Area, California, where they are Chair of the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley. Their recent publications include “How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change” (2018) and “Ark of Martyrs” (2020).
Navigation Chart, 2016
Digital print on Hahnemuhle paper
24" x 36"
TG 3794
Borough Boogie Woogie, 2016
Digital print on Hahnemuhle paper
24” x 36”
TG 3809
Mzungu II, Isla Dogs, 2016
Digital print on Hahnemuhle paper
40” x 23”
TG 3799
Future, 2010-2011
C-Print on Aluminum
12" x 16"
TG 2641
Crossing, 2010-2011
C-Print
12" x 16"
TG 2657
Pressure, 2010-2011
C-print
12" x 16"
TG 2666
Chinaberry (jdth), 2010
C-Print
55" x 40"
TG 2137
Aquarius (trpclfrstwthmnkys), 2010
C-Print
55" x 40"
TG 2101
Mango (mrcnndnstrgglngwthgrll), 2010
C-Print
55" x 40"
TG 2140
Picasso, 2010
C-Print
16" x 12"
TG 2264
Warhol, 2010
C-Print
16″ x 20″
TG 2270
Cezanne, 2010
C-Print
16″ x 12″
TG 2267
Divine1881, 2007
C-Print
15.75" x 23.5"
TG 1588
Divine2894, 2007
C-Print
15.75" x 23.5"
TG 1615
Divine5884, 2007
C-Print
19.75" x 29.75"
TG 1589
BEACH, 2004
C-Print
40" x 60"
TG 1281
CAR, 2004
C-Print
40" x 60"
TG 1190
LECHKO, 2004
C-Print
40" x 60"
TG 1279
BLOSSOM, 2004
C-Print
40″ x 60″
TG 1193
UFO5, 2007
C-Print
60″ x 18″
TG 1598
UFO1, 2007
C-Print
60" x 18"
TG 1599
everything west of here is indian country, 2003
C-Print on Aluminum
20" x 50"
TG 1117
shadows cross Madinat al-Salam, 2003
C-Print on Aluminum
20" x 50"
TG 1118
the Goncourt Brothers stand between Caesar and the Thief of Baghdad, 2003
C-Print on Aluminum
15.75 x 49.25”
TG 1121
he gazed into the liquid darkness in which desires drowned, from where the body's delicious pains emerged, 2001
C-Print on Aluminum
19.5" x 39"
TG 1044
A blurring of the world, a refocusing seconds, minutes, hours, days, maybe years later, with everything put together differently, in ways he doesn't understand, 2001
C-Print on Aluminum
21" x 47"
TG 1045
how to tell a story before it is spoken, before it descends from the convolutions of the mind onto the slippery slopes of the tongue, 2001
C-Print on Aluminum
23.5" x 47"
TG 1045
