Justine de Penning

History once shifted, justifies a future; who is to say who belongs where. In 1780 a Marie Sice married a Pierre de Penning in Our Lady Angels Church, Tranquebar. In this photography based performance work, artist Justine de Penning traces her roots in India dating back to the early 17^th Century (1712). She uses the colonial stereotype to re-visit her ancestral town and reframe the historical myth of the white woman as a tragic exile in the colony (as obstacle in the process of the masculine imperial enterprise) to create a shift in the focus towards a new kind of construction of identity, a failed nostalgic journey that plays with place and time. 

Justine de Penning