Annah, Infinite

'This is an escape story.’ Annah, Infinite turns dominant narratives of Paul Gauguin’s famous painting Annah la Javanaise (c. 1893-94) on its head. The work argues a simple point: there is the possibility that the portrait is a depiction of a pained child. In highlighting the plausibility of this particular scenario in light of how contradictory ‘facts’ surrounding Annah’s life have been assembled in historical narratives, the work draws attention to how ablenormativity functions within arts institutions to mask colonial abuses. Taking a closer look at the ways in which Annah la Javanaise, with its attendant mythologies of Annah the person or people, circulates in the world: as commodity of the global financial market, and simultaneously, as contradiction of tropes regarding disabled, Southeast Asian girls in the ‘developing world’. An incisive look at how colonial ableism, racism, and sexism have kept violent legacies on museum walls, it shows empathetic possibilities for imagining otherwise and charts histories of resilience and of disabled people’s longstanding activism. Interspersed with the author’s own poetry, fiction, and visual art on the painting’s subject, this is a book of emotional heft. It asks us all to acknowledge the possibility of pain in every single portrait, as well as the possibility of escape.