Daniel Giles

My artistic practice explores how identity becomes embedded within visual and performative practices. My works often create connections with historical figures, events, and ideas through methods of appropriation, abstraction, and research. In my practice, creative interventions into cultural archives create critical space from which to reveal hidden narratives, gain new knowledge, and propose different modes of relation between self, other, and society. My work as an artist and researcher brings together different modes of knowledge production, cultural archives, and platforming the work of others through ongoing interdisciplinary exchange and experimental approaches.
My work explores how visual culture and systems of representation shape our understanding and performances of identity and how historical narratives are recast through contemporary media. Working between practices including painting, performance sculpture and installation, I work through material practice, research, and collaboration to explore and unsettle narratives of race and power. I am interested in exploring the conditions through which we see and are seen and what the mediums and spaces of visual perception can tell us about the systems that structure history and society. My current research practice scales between investigations of spatial and visual practices through archival research, the study of modern architecture, and contemporary approaches to literature, performance, and sound.
Drawing on the strategies and methods of the Black radical tradition, my work is informed by practices of refusal, tactical illegibility, abstraction, and protest, all of which serve to question and disrupt dominant narratives and systems that define identity within racial and gendered hierarchies. Working through and around aesthetic traditions of representation my work enacts an epistemological critique of Western visuality as a system deeply embedded within legacies of imperialism and colonialism.