Joiri Minaya experiments with an empowering remedy for Dominican women subjected to the longue durée of the colonial gaze. To locate and instill agency, she mines disparate archives — Google image searches, ethnographic documentation, tourist postcards — uncovering and appropriating hyper-sexualized representations.
In digital collages such as “Continuum” (2020) — on view in her latest exhibition at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York — Minaya imposes Google image search results of Dominican women, often in highly eroticized poses, onto historic photographs taken by colonial ethnographers. Weaving historic and contemporary images, she remixes and collages snippets of postcards sold in tourist shops in Santo Domingo, then slips them back into shops throughout the city, covertly intervening into the circulation of images designed for consumption.
