Allan deSouza

Rumpty Trumpty

Rumpty Trumpty #5, 1997/2007

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For the photographic series Rumpty Trumpty, in 1997, Allan deSouza photographed the Trump Taj Casino in Atlantic City, NJ, reprinting the images again in 2017, from digital scans of the negatives. These negatives bear the traces of extensive damage wrought over time. These dust damaged and scratched prints appear as aged and out of date as the orientalist fantasy that they depict. The images Rumpty Trumpty #5, #6 and #7 are of one of Trump’s failed business projects, a huge casino opened in 1990 and closed in 2016 following worker strikes demanding payment. In an absurd twist, Trump the individual sued Trump the company in order to clear his name, and the building is now called Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. Built for $1.2 milion, the site sold for 4 cents on the dollar.

Artist Allan deSouza works primarily in photography and multi-media, his practice seeks to develop a decolonial aesthetic, engaging with issues of migration, diaspora and relocation in his work. This decolonial aesthetic manifests in what he calls a restaging of “colonial-era material legacies through counter-strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation.” His 2010 DisCourses of Empire saw the artist stage a collection of family photographs on the gallery floor, only for visitors to trample and damage them. His 2014 Ark of Martyrs is a film presenting deSouza’s rewriting of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, juxtaposing images and accounts of ‘civility’ from Conrad to the present day. In 2018 deSouza published a book entitled How Art Can Be Thought (Duke, 2018), examining art pedagogy, and proposing decolonizing artistic, viewing, and pedagogical practices that can form new attachments within the contemporary world through an analysis of traditional categories for judgement.

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Allan deSouza Rumpty Trumpty

Allan deSouza

Rumpty Trumpty