Al-An deSouza works across photo-media, installation, text and performance works as staging grounds for historical memory and its legacies upon the present. Their works draw upon formal and informal archives, remaking them through strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. deSouza’s work has been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Johnson Museum, Ithaca, NY, Krannert Museum, IL; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Mori Museum, Tokyo. deSouza has published numerous essays and two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought, A Handbook for Change (2018), and Ark of Martyrs (2020), a polyphonic, dysphoric replacement of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness
Al-An was an ARC Fellow in Fall 2023 with the Poetry & the Senses initiative – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.