Unresolved histories: Renee Royale and Binh Danh examine colonial power at ROSEGALLERY

ROSEGALLERY is presenting a two-person exhibition featuring works by Renee Royale and Binh Danh, bringing together practices that examine colonial legacies, systems of extraction, and the enduring questions of identity, belonging, and being. Through materially driven processes and historically grounded imagery, both artists contend with how bodies, land, and memory are shaped by power. Binh Danh’s series All I Asking for Is My Body (2024) consists of daguerreotypes made on antique colonial-style silver platters. Drawing its title from Milton Murayama’s 1975 novel, the project examines the histories of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, and African laborers exploited by American plantation systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Danh sources vernacular photographs and stereographs depicting plantation labor and oversight, images shaped by what scholar E. Ann Kaplan has termed the “imperial gaze.” By transferring these photographs onto silverw