Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Photography, painting, research
Website: talwargallery.com
Al-An deSouza (formerly Allan deSouza) was born in 1958 in Nairobi, Kenya, to South Asian parents originally from Goa, India — itself a former Portuguese colony. Their mother was born in Kenya; their father had left Goa before independence. Soon after Kenyan independence, deSouza emigrated with their family to London at age seven. They received a BFA from the Bath Academy of Art, England in 1983, participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York, and earned an MFA in Photography from UCLA in 1997. They have been a practicing artist in London, New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, and have lived and worked in Berkeley since the mid-2010s. They are a Professor in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, where they previously served as Chair for six years. Previously they were Associate Professor and Chair of the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute (2006—2012).
Their fellowships and residencies include a Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington DC (2022); Arts Research Center Poetry and the Senses Fellowship, UC Berkeley (2023); Humanities Research Fellowship, UC Berkeley (2019); Yaddo Artist Residency (2019); Rockefeller Foundation Arts and Literary Arts Residency at the Bellagio Center (2012); and a California Community Foundation/Getty Fellowship (2008). They are represented by Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi.
Their recent publications include How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change (Duke University Press, 2018), an examination of art pedagogy and a decolonial lexicon of terms used in art critique, and Ark of Martyrs (Sming Sming Books, 2020), a polyphonic replacement of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness blending poetry, rap, and prose.
deSouza works across photography, digital media, text, performance, and pedagogy, examining colonizing legacies through strategies of humor, fabulation, and mistranslation. Their photoworks and installations address migration, displacement, overlapping histories, and the poetics of relocation — drawing on their own complicated familial history, which traversed three former colonies (India, Goa, and Kenya) and two former colonial powers (Britain and Portugal). Their practice consistently questions the photograph's claim to capture a fixed moment: through digital manipulation, repeated photography of the same site over time, and the blurring or erasure of portions of images, they foreground the malleable, porous nature of both photographic memory and personal history.
A recurring method is what deSouza calls "rendering" — creating digital paintings based on photographic originals, retaining elements of opacity and illegibility to honor the privacy of the subjects while making their presence felt. Their long-running series structure — The Lost Pictures, Flotsam, Elegies for Futures Past, The World Series — reflects a practice of extended mourning, inquiry, and return to sites of personal and political significance.
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