Product Description
Borrowed Light revisits the colonial image as a site of spectral negotiation—between history, authorship, and the instability of seeing. Centred on Jan Frank Niemantsverdriet’s painting Twee Bataafse Vrouwen, long misidentified as Wanita Sulawesi, this paper examines how acts of naming and visual translation shape the legacies of representation in Southeast Asia’s colonial archive. The project traces the painting’s genealogy from its photographic origin, G. R. Lambert’s The Ladies of H.H. the Sultan of Perak, to its re-inscription, revealing how light, as both medium and metaphor, carried the politics of possession. Through an interdisciplinary approach combining visual analysis, examination, and postcolonial theory, the study interrogates the transformation of photographic documentation into aesthetic objecthood. Techniques such as infrared reflectography are employed not to authenticate, but to uncover the layers of intention and erasure embedded within the work’s surface. The discussion repositions this painting within a broader conversation on the colonial gaze, hybridity, and the ethics of re-illumination. Ultimately, this article proposes to re-examine how such a colonial image continues to inform within a contemporary vision. Rather than restoring an “original” truth, we embrace the distortion as a mode of knowledge, treating the image as a living palimpsest where history, materiality, and memory converge in fragile equilibrium.
