PORTRAY | PERCEIVE
We are portrayed as stories and people as exotic curiosities in stereotypical, Orientalist spectacles.
We were used to serve excitement, both fascination and revulsion – as did the current models and the token diverse casting seen in our localised industries decades later.
The Plagiarist raises important questions about the “cult of authenticity” in which too often, representations of diaspora are artefacts of heightened or caricatured “multiculturalism”, designed to appeal to colonised audiences.
We exist in the background or through the windows of the old guard, merely a set of props for their journey to enlightenment.
They see only what they want to see, prefiguring other ‘diversity porn’ like the token friend, colleague or associate they refer to.
What seemed unimaginably strange and remote becomes fascinating yet distanced, exiled for their purveyance.
We are the EXILED ORGANISATION.
The Plagiarist, ‘22-‘23