Dissolve/Resist

Still from Dissolve/Resist

Still from Dissolve/Resist

Still from Dissolve/Resist

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Still from Four Letters On The Table

Still from Four Letters On The Table

Still from Four Letters On The Table

Still from Four Letters On The Table

This work is a multilayered, process-based engagement with the colonial male gaze and its lasting presence in contemporary consciousness, visual culture, and embodied experience. A postcard found in an archive serves as the starting point to question the colonial gaze and its visual economy. It becomes a case study of power relations embedded in colonial imagery: possession, control, and oppression

The conceptual framework emerged through dialogues focused on identifying and understanding the colonial male gaze—how it shapes our socialization, image-making, and structures of power. It is not merely a “Western gaze,” but one shaped by colonial history and ideologies of dominance, internalized and reproduced across cultural and gender lines.

Inspired by thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Sara Ahmed, the work explores how racialized and sexualized bodies are perceived, instrumentalized, and made hyper-visible or invisible.

The project unfolds in three parts, connected through time: personal memory, historical archive, and immediate bodily response. The first work Four Letters On The Table explores the body as a site of memory, violence, and care. Through letters and studio-based scenes, it questions colonial and patriarchal norms, drawing on gestures of tenderness passed down from my grandmother.
The second Untitled focuses on colonial image-making during the French occupation of Algeria. Only the eyes of the women* on the postcard remain visible—everything else is blacked out. Their gaze is returned to the viewer as a call for reflection.
The third piece Dissolve/Resist visualizes bodily resistance through abstraction, creating a space where the body rejects categorization and insists on fluid, self-determined forms.

This work doesn’t offer solutions but uses discomfort and awareness as tools of decolonial practice. The gaze is not neutral—nor are its viewers. Our Gaze Is Not Yours To Claim challenges us all to question how we look, what we see, and
how power shapes both.

bachelor’s project
mentored by thomas knüsel
switzerland, 2025

Four Letters On The Table:
Full HD, 16:9, color, english voice-over, 6:59 minutes

Untitled:
Original Colonial Postcard, 14x8.7cm
Montage of colonial Postcard, 403x250 cm

Dissolve/Resist:
Full HD, 9:16, color, length variable

exhibition view

lucerne university of art
design, film and art lucerne, 2025
lucerne university of art
design, film and art lucerne, 2025
© Ariane Hügli
lucerne university of art
design, film and art lucerne, 2025
© Ariane Hügli
lucerne university of art
design, film and art lucerne, 2025
© Ariane Hügli
lucerne university of art
design, film and art lucerne, 2025
© Ariane Hügli
lucerne university of art
design, film and art lucerne, 2025
© Ariane Hügli
lucerne university of art
design, film and art lucerne, 2025
© Ariane Hügli

Our Gaze Is Not Yours To Claim

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