Tabula rasa (Latin): an absence of preconceived ideas or predetermined goals; a clean slate.

 

The genesis of modern art marked an essential rupture, defiantly challenging the rigid conservatism of academic institutions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, artists rejected prescribed notions of beauty and objective representation, seeking instead a subjective truth rooted in expression and experience. This avant-garde shift, from Impressionism to Cubist abstraction, successfully dislodged the master narrative, proclaiming an aesthetic freedom that valued the internal life of the artist. This conceptual liberation allowed art to evolve from a mere craft into a critical language of inquiry.

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However, this revolutionary spirit remained constrained by its Eurocentric origins. Modernism, despite rejecting conservative aesthetics, reinforced a colonial narrative, especially through movements like Primitivism, which treated non-Western forms—specifically African and Oriental sculpture—as raw material for European innovation. This aesthetic appropriation positioned the coloniser as the sole interpreter of culture, reframing the visual language of the colonised as exotic or “primitive". The resulting modern canon was therefore built upon a foundation of unequal power, keeping the narrative of aesthetic progress tethered exclusively to Western metropolitan centres.

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I start by engaging this contentious inheritance by exploring how the colonial encounter permanently restructured identity through enforced cultural syncretism, and the conflict it produces today. Postcolonial discourse terms this state as hybridity: a liminal, often resistant "third space" where identity is negotiated, or mediated, in the aftermath of colonisation. My works attempt to map this territory—the coexistence of inherited tradition and imposed modernity—as a way of life, as everyday. By fragmenting and fusing disparate cultural materials, I assert the generative power of the middle ground, proving this hybrid space is the complex ground zero for contemporary selfhood.