OUTSTANDING UNIVERSAL VALUE

When is art? How is power spatialized?

Outstanding Universal Value is a series that employs photography as both a method of inquiry and a site of critique—an instrument through which histories are made visible, contested, and potentially reimagined. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which visual culture mediates our understanding of heritage, identity, and belonging, and how global systems of representation—such as UNESCO World Heritage frameworks—reflect and reproduce colonial structures of power.

While every society constructs narratives about its past, the processes of heritage designation, inscription, and conservation are never neutral. They are shaped by contemporary political interests, economic imperatives, and culturally specific epistemologies. The category of "World Heritage," in particular, emerges from a Eurocentric worldview rooted in archaeological, architectural, and art-historical discourses. It privileges the monumental and the static, often to the detriment of living communities and vernacular knowledge systems. In this sense, World Heritage functions as empire reimagined: a globalized regime that commodifies cultural sites, aestheticizes history, and displaces local agency in the name of “universal value.”

Through a combination of photographic research, site-responsive work, and critical writing, I investigate how these systems organize visibility—who and what is seen, preserved, or erased. I draw on anti-colonial and decolonial methodologies to interrogate how the image functions not simply as representation, but as a technology of power. Photographs produce affect; they shape sensibilities, circulate ideologies, and structure the spatial politics of recognition and exclusion.

Outstanding Universal Value considers how the visual field around designated heritage sites becomes a battleground for competing narratives, and how photography might intervene in these spaces—not to document, but to unsettle. By attending to both image making and image breaking, my practice interrogates how artists can disrupt dominant historical narratives and expose the imperial logics embedded in the visual construction of place.

UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE
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