Image: Heba Y. Amin, courtesy CHROMA, Zilberman Gallery
“Opacity not as disappearance, but as an affirmation” – A review of Heba Y. Amin’s “Future Ways of Seeing”
Presented as part of Kampnagel’s “Investigative Arts” focus, Heba Y. Amin’s keynote “Future Ways of Seeing” unfolds as both an artist talk and an investigation into the enduring colonial legacies embedded in modernity’s scopic infrastructures, from the colonial camera to algorithmic vision. This review by Masza Raesch summarizes Amin’s key ideas with added context and reflections.
Blindsight: Seeing Without Seeing
Amin begins with “blindsight”, a neurological condition that allows the body to sense visual stimuli without conscious awareness. For her, it becomes an allegory for our contemporary moral and perceptual condition: we see without acknowledging, perceive without engaging. A blindness that is cultivated. A defect of responsibility rather than of the eye.
A blind spot that Michael Rothberg, too, has named: the poverty of our language when it comes to power, privilege, and structural harm. The void that opens, when, in reckoning and engaging with what Hannah Arendt in Collective Responsibility (1968) has termed “this vicarious responsibility for things we have not done”, we move beyond the binary of victim and perpetrator. Less as an identity than as a conceptual lens, Rothberg introduces The Implicated Subject to illuminate and navigate the complex web of indirect, structural, and collective forms of agency that sustain harm while remaining largely unseen.
Through the Colonial Lens: Scopic Orientalism
Amin traces this blindness to photography’s colonial beginnings. Her point of departure is Horace Vernet’s Harem de Mehemet-Ali (1839), often cited as the first photograph from Africa. It depicts no women, only the windows of a harem — absence, charged with Orientalist fantasy. This photograph and photography itself are not neutral. Emerging at the nexus of conquest and empire, they are structured by its epistemologies and désirs.
At its core lies Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. Drawing on Gramsci’s cultural hegemony and Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir, Orientalism exposes how Western ways of seeing constructed the “Orient” as an exotic, racialized Other. This colonial gaze did not just depict the East, it produced it: as the West’s mirror and opposite; reinforcing binaries of progress and backwardness, civilization and barbarism, to justify imperial domination. Through les Sciences et les Arts, the West projected a framework that rendered the Orient visible only through its own lens, reinforcing Western identity and authority. Erming out of conquest, Orientalism exposes how visual and epistemic regimes served power, shaping enduring Western perceptions and discourse.
Horace Vernet, Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, Harem de Méhémet-Ali, 1839, lithograph - Heba Y. Amin: "Windows on the West" 
Heba Y. Amin: "Windows on the West" - courtesy CHROMA, Zilberman Gallery 
Heba Y. Amin: "Windows on the West" - courtesy CHROMA, Zilberman Gallery
Windows on the West: Unweaving the Colonial Gaze
Amin’s own work “Windows on the West“ (2019) reclaims Vernet’s daguerreotype by literally weaving it anew. Using Jacquard weaving techniques, she transforms it into a textile copy. What was once a colonial photograph, becomes woven code, reversing the power relation of representation. By using a Jacquard loom, this proto-digital machine prefigured modern computing by punching through binaries and situated the image back into the local technologies of weaving, when Amin reminds us that technology encodes the epistemologies of its origin.
Linking the Jacquard loom and textile technologies to the underlying structures of digital and algorithmic logic, echoes Sadie Plant’s “Zeroes + Ones“(1997). As Plant suggests, the histories and technologies of digitality are deeply entwined with textile practices. Yet, in preserving these threads, they also carry feminist and non-Western lineages that can challenge the masculinized myths of the digital age.
The Camera as a Weapon: Femmes Algériennes unveiled
Amin extends her critique of optical technologies and the colonial gaze into the visual regimes of warfare, referring to Harun Farocki’s filmic essay Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988). Here, Farocki exposes the latent violence embedded in the Western gaze through the photo series Femmes Algériennes, depicting women forced to unveil before the camera during the Algerian War. Those photos at once disclose the predatory gaze of their author and photography as a technology of control: facilitating the dehumanization of colonial subjects, transforming them into objects of surveillance and classification, stripped of historical or emancipatory agency. Circulating within an Orientalist visual economy, they reinforced power hierarchies that legitimized colonialism as a civilizing mission.
Colonial domination is inscribed not only in photography but in the very gesture of unveiling itself. A point which Frantz Fanon explored in Algeria Unveiled (1959), framing the veil as a battleground between colonial fantasies of ‘liberation’ and anti-colonial resistance. Both forced unveiling and photographic capture hinge on exposure and precarious visibility: objects without the right to object, represented without a right to self-representation. What is the fate of those thus deprived of rights and excluded from Western ideals of autonomy and agency? As Sylvia Wynter reminds us, such subjects are expelled from the colonial figure of “Man,” the supposed universal human, and hence outside of the category of humanity itself.
Camouflage and Military Technology – or the Dialectic of the Avant-Garde
Vernet was a trained military and historical painter; Marc Garanger, a conscripted hobby photographer later turned photojournalist. Artists, tasked with documenting in a military context. Looking at the Kampnagel focus’ theme, Investigative Arts, what role can such art play amid rising militarization, strongman politics, and genocidal violence? The reflexive answer might be: Uncover! Critique! Yet Amin points to a more ambivalent entanglement between art and regimes of violence; to the ways artists have also advanced technologies and aesthetics of domination, to the practical use of art for military purposes. She follows this through the linked histories of camouflage and colonial ways of seeing, showing how camoufleurs turned vision itself into a tool of imperial power (see also the recently published Opacity as Resistance).
Artist critique, investigative art, the avant-garde—art carries an ambivalent legacy. As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (1999) argue, today’s real existing neoliberalism arose both as a counterrevolution against the social movements of the 1960s and as a co-optation of artists’ critiques of Fordist labour. Beyond Western capitalism, the dialectic turns darker: Boris Groys (2008) has noted that modernism’s revolutionary drive to remake the world in the name of socialism anticipated, in part, the Total Art of Stalinism. This is no accusation, but an invitation to reconsider art’s complicity in sustaining systems of domination; past, present, and future.
Colonial Modernity: Laboratories of Operational Transparency
Amin illustrates arts entanglement with military and colonial power through the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate, a British WWII unit near Cairo that enlisted surrealists to stage illusions: dummy tanks, fake airfields, even the vanishing of the Suez Canal. This modernist theatre of deception turned Egypt’s deserts into an imperial laboratory, transforming the landscape into an optical weapon that prefigured today’s scopic regimes. Trained in North Africa, this aerial gaze made the “Orient” visible, knowable, and thus governable; reflecting Western modernity’s enduring logics that to see is to know, and to know is to control.
A critique of modernity that resonates with thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman on ambivalence and the holocaust, alongside Okwui Enwezor and Homi K. Bhabha from a post-colonial perspective. All expose Modernity’s foundational paradox: in seeking to eliminate uncertainty through classification, it renders some groups unclassifiable—ambiguous, unintelligible, dangerous. Through its exclusionary logic of binarity that fears hybridity and ambiguity, Modernity has fuelled violence and genocide and will keep on doing so. In a sense it is itself a technology or machine that, in defining itself through its fear of the unfamiliar and its obsession with order, ceaselessly re-produces ‘alien’ others and new-old apparatuses of monitoring (or even annihilating) classification and visibility.
Digital Orientalism: Machine Vision and Colonial Memory
Operations like the Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate anticipated today’s “operational images”: visuals to direct machines and militaries. The continuity, Amin argued, is chilling. Aerial reconnaissance photos of the 1940s have become today’s drone feeds; the colonial archive has morphed into the digital database. The gaze that once classified lands and bodies now operates through machine vision. Facial recognition, predictive policing, drone targeting, all automate the same hierarchies of race and power. These are not errors, but reproductions of enduring systems of control.
Today’s digital systems perpetuate colonial biases by categorizing, controlling, and erasing marginalized voices; biases, society continues to navigate with unsettling ease. The algorithmic infrastructures of contemporary visual and informational economies thus echo the racial logics of colonial modernity, as explored by Louise Amoore (2020), Ruha Benjamin (2019), Safiya Umoja Noble (2018) and many more. Across differing emphases, they reveal code as a palimpsest of historical violence, reproducing hierarchies of visibility and knowledge; what Amin aptly frames as digital Orientalism.
A set of dummies propped up in the Sahara Desert awaiting an atomic bomb explosion during the French nuclear testing, 1960. The French Reggane nuclear test series was a group of 4 nuclear tests conducted in 1960-1961 during the Algerian War. Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo - Heba Y. Amin "Atom Elegy" 
Heba Y. Amin: "Atom Elegy" - courtesy Helmut Claus, Städtische Galerie Nordhorn 
Heba Y. Amin: "Atom Elegy" - courtesy CHROMA, Zilberman Gallery
Atom Elegy: Hauntology of Progressiveness Turned Catastrophe
We quickly sanctify new technologies as “progress,” only to recoil when their destructiveness becomes undeniable. Perhaps it is also art’s task to investigate this aporia of technological advancement, as Yvan Goll did in his poem Atom Elegy from Fruit of Saturn (1946). In its first draft, Goll celebrates the atomic bomb as a radiant emblem of human progress. A love letter—never published. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Goll revised it, celebration curdled into horror and grief.
Atomic power, and the crematory, once emblems of technological triumph became tools of catastrophe, leading Amin to a 1960 photograph of France’s nuclear tests in the Algerian desert: rows of mannequins awaiting the blast, mute stand-ins for human bodies; officially study tools yet rumoured to be Algerian prisoners disguised as dummies and sacrificed for data. The image exposes a colonial logic: land turned laboratory, bodies turned instruments, destruction turned progress. In her project Atom Elegy (2022) Amin rebuilds this scene in miniature, investigating again how images themselves can become weapons, witnesses, and silences.
Future ways of Seeing: Opacity as Resistance and the Task of Investigative Arts
Where do we go from here? In her closing remarks, Amin asks how marginalized communities might not only elude the machine’s all-seeing gaze but also disrupt the algorithms colonial logics. What would it mean to overturn two centuries of scopic regimes? In an era when the oppressed are hyper-visible to drones, biometrics, and predictive AI. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity”, Amin redefines opacity not as disappearance, but as an affirmation: to the right to be seen without being reduced, to elude empire and algorithm. To undo the colonial gaze is to live beyond translation.
Perhaps this is the task of investigative art today: fully conscious of its own entanglement in the histories of the colonial gaze and in systems of exploitation, it can no longer be content simply to expose what lies hidden. Algorithms already script the future of vision. For Amin, then, the task is not merely to evade their gaze but to rewrite it, to invent new grammars of sight; Future Ways of Seeing that resist the totalizing demand for transparency and affirm opacity as a form of resistance.