Kotama Bouabane is currently working on his Master of Fine Arts in photography at Concordia University. In 2003 he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design where he later worked as a teaching assistant/technician in the photography department. In Toronto, Kotama was a board member of the Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and an intern at Vtape, an artist-run gallery. Kotama’s work is about de-contextualizing material objects found in a specific cultural context and emptying them of that specificity in order to play with their meanings. In creating this work inspired by Champlain’s Astrolabe, Kotama decided to explore his own identity through this inanimate object. Kotama reacts to the astrolabe literally, as a device used to navigate from point A to point B, and conceptually as the finding, searching and looking for new territory. These are characteristics that identity shares with the astrolabe. By erasing the plaque that had the symbol of the astrolabe on it, the trace of this historical remnant has disappeared, so that the course and significance of the object is altered. Kotama explains, “I’m interested in the authenticity of this object on the brink of importance/meaninglessness.”

Wes Colclough