Nigerian sculptor Peju Alatise and British/Kenyan video artist Grace Ndiritu create works centered on the female form. In these works the artists turn to flesh, their own and representations of, in order to expose prevailing notions of the black female body. Peju Alatise’s mixed-media sculpture, 9 Year Old Bride (2010), depicts the hollow bodies of seven small female figures created from fabric and frozen in motion by resin and white paint. Ndiritu’s video paintings, Still Life: Lying Down Textiles (2007)and Still Life: White Textiles (2005-2007) similarly employs cloths as means of covering and creating the body. In Still Life: Lying Down Textiles, Ndiritu reclines on the floor amongst a rich array of fabrics. Completely covered by cloth, except for her right arm, Ndiritu breathes heavily and twitches for entirety of the five-minute film. In her second film, Still Life: White Textiles, Ndiritu manipulates a large piece of fabric between her bare legs and arms which hints at, but never grants nudity. This thesis argues that both Alatise and Ndiritu incorporate wax-printed fabrics to conceal/reveal and construct/deconstruct the female form. Both artists do so as means of destabilizing dominant essentialized notions of black womanhood rooted in colonial visual practices. The paper draws similarities between Alatise and Ndiritu’s works to colonial photographic practices and historical figures of curiosity, such as Sara Baartman, which both inform contemporary understandings of the black female body. Rather than simply repeat—and therefore perpetuate—Western imagined qualities of deviant sexualities and sexual availability, this thesis asserts that Alatise and Ndiritu allude to and ultimately undermine these notions through a careful control of nudity. The last section of the thesis distinguishes the artistic practices of Ndiritu and Alatise from artists working in similar mediums. Though artists like Yinka Shonibare and Lalla Essaydi incorporate textiles into their works, Ndiritu and Alatise are unique for their use of textiles as extensions of the body rather than simply coverings for the figure. Lastly, the thesis argues that Alatise and Ndiritu straddle both Orientalist and Occidentalist understandings of African culture, incorporating elements of both, seemingly inverse, theories into their artistic practices. / text

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The purpose of this thesis is to underline the importance of developing useful and mutually beneficial relationships between local iwi and museums, and to consider the subsequent implications for museum practice. The thesis assembles a variety of contemporary sources in order to document and construct a chronological narrative of events: minutes and communications; interviews with staff and key participants in the process of acquiring the Partington Collection by the Whanganui Regional Museum; media reports; and a survey of recent literature. The Partington Collection of Whanganui Maori photographs is integral to this examination because of its importance to both Whanganui iwi and the Whanganui Regional Museum. The situation of colonial photography in museums has changed over the century from being viewed as a factual reflection of the cultural imperatives of indigenous peoples, to being viewed as a colonial construct consigning indigenous peoples to their past. Because this Collection is the most comprehensive photographic documentary of Whanganui Maori from the turn of last century it adds immense value to the Museum’s existing collections. However to Whanganui iwi the photographs of their ancestors are taonga tuku iho: far more than just photographic images they are demonstrably and undeniably imbued with the mana of their tupuna. The public auction in 2001 of the Partington Collection created a catalyst for action and an opportunity for Whanganui iwi and the Museum to work together to ensure the return of the photographs to Whanganui, an outcome that was finally achieved in 2002. The thesis concludes that the successful return of the Partington Collection to Whanganui could not have been possible without the long term evolving relationship between iwi and the Museum and in particular the more recent emergence of a bi-cameral governance structure. Furthermore the maintenance of relationships and communication is crucial to the evolution of museum practice. This would suggest a reversal of the traditional perspective that museum practice and procedure is pre-eminent. Instead, this case study demonstrates that relationships are at the heart of museum practice.

While the role of photography in enforcing hegemonic ideologies has been amply studied, this thesis addresses the under-researched topic of how photography undermined dominant narratives in specific historical circumstances. I argue that, in the later part of the long nineteenth century, photographs were used to represent the natural world in contexts where their functions were uncertain and their capacities not clearly defined, and that these hesitations allowed for the expression of resistances to dominant social attitudes towards nature. I analyse how these divergences were articulated through three independent case studies, each addressing a corpus of photographs which has been marginalised in scholarly discourse. The case studies all concern photographs of vegetation. The first one discusses photographs produced around Fontainebleau during the Second French Empire, commonly understood as auxiliary materials for Barbizon painters, and argues that they were in fact autonomous representations, reflecting marginal modes of experiencing nature which resisted its prevailing construction as spectacle. The second case study examines a photographic series depicting Amazonian vegetation, published between 1900 and 1906, and shows how, in attempting to satisfy conflicting ideological demands, these photographs undermined the hierarchies enforced upon the natural world by colonial science. The third case study analyses photographs from an early twentieth-century environmentalist treatise, and demonstrates how, while the author's discourse seemingly complied with conventional attitudes towards nature, the photographs instituted an ethical stance opposed to early conservation's aesthetic focus and anthropocentrism. Throughout the case studies, I argue that the photographs were consubstantial to the emergence of these resistances; that dissenting representations stemmed from a tension between their producers' lived experience and the ideological frameworks which informed each context; and that this process engendered remarkable formal innovations, which are not usually associated to non-artistic images. I contend that radical renewals of visual expression occur in all representational contexts, as image producers adapt their tools or forge new ones according to circumstances, and that more attention must be paid to such visual innovations outside the field of artistic production.