12 July 2022 — Announcement

Press Release: Black Sonic Heritage as Heresy Exhibition

Opening reception 14 July

FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg Bunting Road Campus

18:00 – 21:30

VIAD (Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre) and CSSJ (Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University) are excited to present Black Sonic: Heritage as Heresy, an exhibition at FADA Gallery. In 2019, VIAD, in partnership with the CSSJ, embarked on a major three-part project. Titled The Imagined New, (or What Happens when History is a Catastrophe?), this long-term project offers multiple interdisciplinary platforms for critical exchange and research around African and African-Diasporic art practices as they relate to questions of history, archive and the alternative imagination(s) of radical Black tradition.

As the second volume of The Imagined New, Black Sonic: Heritage as Heresy first emerged as a four-part digital programme of original content, uploaded to The Imagined New website for uninhibited, public engagement. The digital programme responds to a central inquiry of the broader, long-term project: If the fantasy of ‘civilisation’ is sustained by imagining and reimagining relationships with the environment, memory and a set of inherent rules which imbricate whiteness with the sacred, then how does the profane (read Blackness) undertake this task of historical (re)imagination? How do those that face down the catastrophe of history rebuild in its aftermath(s)?

Central to this rebuilding is a certain conception of Heritage and Heresy. Here, heritage is not intended as a kind of singular cultural, national or continental identity but as praxis or rather, a set of praxes that operate both in relation to and against the logo-centrism of ‘civilisation.’ As an expression, Blackness challenges the stability of the sacred-profane dialectic. In so doing, heresy reveals the paradox of the orthodox and enacts the possibility of choice.

The programme’s four online installments, or sets, (Black Phonic Substance, Radical Imagination of the Ordinary, Erased Bodies which Speak, and Perceptive Knowledges) explore sound and sonics not as content, category, or the cultural ‘by-product’ of the Black experience, but as a heritage of heretical praxis; as so many ways of being and becoming.

Referring to a systemic mainstream culture of marginalising Blackness, Black Sonic asks:

If the project of history is one of silence, of the systematic erasure and disappearance of those considered peripheral to the optic fantasy and logo-centrism of ‘civilization’ (read whiteness), then how might the sonic present a uniquely enabling modality for thinking, feeling and performing a different historical imagination?

In line with the mission of the digital programme, Black Sonic: Heritage as Heresy is reimagined in new form as an immersive exhibition at FADA Gallery. This multimedia offering includes film and sound installations, print media, photography, and classical African art; all tracing the various ways in which Black knowledge evolves across history and location through sonic production and expression.

The exhibition is an audio-visual experience that transports audiences through various Black soundings from across the African diaspora.

Featured artists:

DJ Lynnée Denise, Michael McMillan, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Ihab Balla, Rhea Storr, Geri Augusto, Jessica Care Moore, Jonzi D, Axelle ‘Ebony’ Munezero, Bolegue Manuela, Nafisah Baba. Curators: Machel Bogues – VIAD Research Associate, Melaine Ferdinand-King – CSSJ Graduate Research Fellow, Lois Anguria – VIAD Research Manager, William Johnson – VIAD Research Associate

The opening reception will include live performances by :

Mzanzi Youth Choir

The Mzanzi Youth Choir is widely regarded as the best show choir in South Africa. Currently in residence at UJ Arts & Culture, 18 members of the Mzanzi Youth Choir will perform an acapella-style arrangement of southern African traditional songs.

Tshepang Ramoba

Tshepang Ramboa is an award-winning singer, songwriter, drummer, producer, and film music producer currently on tour as a member of the alternative rock band BLK JKS. In anticipation of the release of his latest EP, Lefase, Tshepang will perform selections from his discography, an assortment of alternative music inspired by Sepedi folk song and culture.

Partners:

VIAD (Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre)

CSSJ (Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice

Brown University)

The Imagined New

The FADA Art Gallery

07 July 2022 —Announcement

Press Release: 45 designers from over 20 countries feature in landmark Africa Fashion exhibition

Africa Fashion Supported by Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, GRoW @ Annenberg Gallery 40 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023 With additional support from Bank of America and Merchants on Long With thanks to Africa Fashion Foundation

Tickets now on sale at vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/africa-fashion | #AfricaFashion Exhibition trailer with designer quotes can be viewed here Press Images available at pressimages.vam.ac.uk

Opening this Saturday 2 July, Africa Fashion is a landmark exhibition celebrating the irresistible creativity, ingenuity and unstoppable global impact of contemporary African fashions. The exhibition is the UK’s most extensive exhibition of African fashions to date, celebrating the vitality and innovation of this vibrant scene, as dynamic and varied as the continent itself.

Over 250 objects are on display for the exhibition, with approximately half of these drawn from the museum’s collection, including 70 new acquisitions. Many of the garments on show are from the personal archives of a selection of iconic mid-twentieth century African designers – Shade Thomas-Fahm, Chris Seydou, Kofi Ansah and Alphadi, marking the first time their work will be shown in a London museum. The exhibition also celebrates influential contemporary African fashion creatives including Imane Ayissi, IAMISIGO, Moshions, Thebe Magugu and Sindiso Khumalo. Africa Fashion showcases these objects and the stories behind them alongside personal insights from the designers, together with sketches, editorial spreads, photographs, film and catwalk footage.

New acquisitions highlighting fashion trends of the day from across the continent, paired with personal testimonies, textiles and photographs, are on display for the first time. Highlight objects include photography from 10 families answering the public call-out, an Alphadi dress of cotton and brass gifted to the museum by the designer and a new piece designed specifically for the exhibition by Maison ArtC

Dr Christine Checinska, Senior Curator African and African Diaspora: Textiles and Fashion, said: Our guiding principle for Africa Fashion is the foregrounding of individual African voices and perspectives. The exhibition presents African fashions as a self-defining art form that reveals the richness and diversity of African histories and cultures. To showcase all fashions across such a vast region would be to attempt the impossible. Instead, Africa Fashion celebrates the vitality and innovation of a selection of fashion creatives, exploring the work of the vanguard in the twentieth century and the creatives at the heart of this eclectic and cosmopolitan scene today. We hope this exhibition will spark a renegotiation of the geography of fashion and become a game-changer for the field.

Starting with the African independence and the liberation years that sparked a radical political and social reordering across the continent, the exhibition looks to explore how fashion, alongside music and the visual arts, formed a key part of Africa’s cultural renaissance, laying the foundation for today’s fashion revolution. Across contemporary couture, ready-to-wear, made-to-order and adornment, the exhibition also seeks to offer a close-up look at the new generation of ground-breaking designers, collectives, stylists and fashion photographers working in Africa today. It explores how the digital world accelerated the expansion of the industry, irreversibly transforming global fashions as we know them. From global fashion weeks to celebrity wearers and the role of social media, Africa Fashion celebrates and champion the diversity and ingenuity of the continent’s fashion scene.

The exhibition forms part of a broader and ongoing V&A commitment to grow the museum’s permanent collection of work by African and African Diaspora designers, working collaboratively to tell new layered stories about the richness and diversity of African creativity, cultures, and histories, using fashion as a catalyst.

The exhibition is accompanied by a wider public programme focused on Africa Fashion, including in-conversations and talks, learning events, music performances and free to attend live events.

Omoyemi Akerele, Founder and Director, Lagos Fashion Week and Style House Files said: African fashion is something that has existed forever, something that has been a part of us. African fashion is the future. African fashion is now. It’s not just designers, there’s a whole ecosystem of models, make-up artists, photographers, illustrators – imagine bringing everybody’s work to life season in season out. Fashion that’s created by our people for our people and for the benefit of growing and developing our economy. This exhibition is important because for the very first time fashion from the continent will be viewed from a diverse perspective which spans centuries.

Thebe Magugu, Womenswear Designer said: I feel like there’s so many facets of what we’ve been through as a continent, that people don’t actually understand. Now more than ever African designers are taking charge of their own narrative and telling people authentic stories, not the imagined utopias.

Artsi, Fashion Designer, Maison ArtC said: Africa Fashion means the past, the future and the present at the same time. The joy of life and the joy of colour is completely different and very particular to the continent. It’s a language of heritage, it’s a language of DNA, it’s a language of memories.

About the exhibition:

The exhibition begins with a contemporary ensemble that combines shimmering silk with exuberant layers of raffia by Imane Ayissi. Born in Cameroon, the couturier sits at the crossroads between fashion systems, bridging historical and contemporary periods, continental and Global Africa, artisanal craft making and haute couture. This ensemble introduces the idea that African fashions are beyond definition and that creatives can and do choose their own paths.

The ground floor of the exhibition continues with an African Cultural Renaissance section that focuses on the African liberation years from the mid-late 1950s to 1994. The political and social reordering that took place galvanised a long period of unbounded creativity across fashion, music, and the visual arts. On display there are protest posters, publications and records embodying this era of radical change. Early publications from members of the Mbari Club, established for African writers, artists, and musicians, sit alongside the cover artwork for Beasts of No Nation by Fela Kuti, a call-to-arms album which embodied the communal feeling of frustrations with the politics of the time but also the energy of Africa’s creativity and its artists’ drive to create beautiful things

Politics and Poetics of Cloth considers the importance of cloth in many African countries and the way in which the making and wearing of indigenous cloths in the moment of independence became a strategic political act. Wax prints, commemorative cloth, àdìrẹ kente and bògòlanfini will be shown – fragments of a rich textile history that includes thousands of techniques from across the continent. Highlight objects include a strip of printed seersucker cotton from the V&A collection featuring the image of an open palm and the words ‘freedom in my hand I bring’ incorporating the newly independent Ghana insignia – a visible expression of community concerns as well as national, and individual identities. Also on display is a commemorative cloth made in the early 1990s following the release of Nelson Mandela, featuring a portrait of the soon to be first Black President of South Africa and the words ‘A BETTER LIFE FOR ALL – WORKING TOGETHER FOR JOBS, PEACE AND FREEDOM’.

Shade Thomas-Fahm (b.1933), Chris Seydou (1949 – 1994), Kofi Ansah (1951-2014), Alphadi (b.1957), Naïma Bennis (1940–2008) and their peers represent the first generation of African designers to gain attention throughout the continent and globally. Marking the first moment in which their work is shown in a London museum, the next section, The Vanguard, traces their rise and impact, their creative process, and inspirations, brought to life by real stories from those who loved and wore their distinctive designs. Highlights include a re-imaging of the traditional Nigerian ìró by Shade Thomas-Fahm – known as ‘Nigeria’s first fashion designer’. Alongside will be a dress of silk and lurex from 1983 by Chris Seydou, known for promoting indigenous African textiles like bògòlanfini on the global stage. Ghanaian fashion designer Kofi Ansah’s iconic fusion of African and European aesthetics will be represented in a blue robe with traces of the Japanese kimono, the European judge’s robe and the West African agbádá robe. The innovation of Alphadi, described as the ‘Magician of the Desert’ is shown with a dress of cotton and brass from 1988, gifted to the museum by the designer.

Capturing Change focuses on photographic portraits of the mid-late 20th century, capturing the mood of nations on the brink of self-rule – each shot documenting the modernity, cosmopolitanism and fashion consciousness of individuals with agency and a desire to use it. The euphoria of decolonization coincided with the democratisation of photography made possible through cheaper film and lighter weight cameras. Photographic portraits taken in studios and domestic spaces became affirmations of agency and self-representation, making pride in being Black and African visible. Highlights from this section include studio photography from Sanlé Sory, Michel Papami Kameni and Rachidi Bissiriou. The stylish colour portraits of James Barnor also sits alongside domestic photography of 10 families gleaned from the V&A’s public call-out in January 2021.

On the mezzanine level of the exhibition, the new generation of ground-breaking designers, collectives, stylists and fashion photographers working in Africa today is celebrated. A new piece designed specifically for the exhibition, ‘A Dialogue Between Cultures’, by Maison ArtC introduces this floor.

A first section on Minimalism features a look by Rwandan fashion house Moshions, known for re-imagining traditional Rwandan forms and cultural motifs into contemporary pieces. Paying tribute to the ceremonial attire worn historically by Rwandan royalty, the menswear look on show references the traditional Umwitero, a sash draped over the shoulder as well as beadwork and embroidery taking inspiration from Imigongo aesthetics.

Mixology features an ensemble from IAMISIGO’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection, ‘Gods of the Wilderness’ which references ancient west African masquerade costumes. For this collection designer Bubu Ogisi was inspired by traditional west African abstract performance art, and the unique visual identity and traditions of adornment which have been created by different individual cultural groups.

Artisanal showcases a blue and white ensemble of DAKALA CLOTH by NKWO, who work with small-scale artisan makers across the African continent that specialise in hand crafts such as hand dyeing, weaving, beading and embroidery. NKWO explores ways of using waste materials in her designs while still preserving traditional textile craft skills. DAKALA CLOTH, made from waste fabric is stripped and then sewn back together with a technique that gives the appearance of traditional woven cloth.

Afrotopia features a look from Thebe Magugu’s Alchemy Collection that centres on African spirituality and the relationship we have with our ancestors. The designer collaborated with Noentla Khumalo, a stylist and traditional healer, on the collection. Alongside is a look by Selly Raby Kane, which takes inspiration from Afro-Futurism.

In Sartorialists, costume designer, stylist and photographer Gouled Ahmed’s self-portraiture revolts against cultural norms, mixing textured garments from the Horn of Africa with contemporary everyday materials to play with notions of identity. Ahmed’s work challenges the lack of nuance in the depictions of non-binary Black Muslims’.

In Adornment a neckpiece made of brass, sisal and borax salt from Ami Doshi Shah’s ‘Salt of the Earth’ collection examines the talismanic properties of jewellery and the storytelling ability of materials drawn from nature.

Co-Creation spotlights personalised, contemporary twists on tradition with commissioned bespoke outfits made for the wedding of Lady Ashely Shaw-Scott Adjaye and Sir David Adjaye OBE by Kofi Ansah. Over the course of four appointments at his atelier in Accra, Ansah and the couple discussed every aspect of the designs, made from Ashanti Bonwire kente cloth from the designer’s extensive collection. The couple were later photographed for British Vogue magazine wearing their Kofi Ansah designs.

-ENDS-

Black Sonic: Heritage as Heresy

The Imagined New vol II | theimaginednew.org

Set 3: ERASED BODIES WHICH SPEAK

3 June 2022

Black Sonic Heritage as Heresy: set 3 is now available live at theimaginednew.org! 

Protest / revolutionary / folk song across Africa and its diaspora carry intonation of hope, accusation, and the memorialisation of Black bodies. This tradition often scores a history of, yes enacted violences against Black bodies, but also triumphs and joy. Folk music can become a living archive of activism and instructional voicing. Meaning that through its performance instruction is given for the progression of movements by Black persons.

In this set we explore the way archives have contributed to contemporary ways of thinking, feeling and being. Dr Kholeka Shange sites the joy of movement and examines the use of Lale Ilalilale and Wololo!  

In ‘Our Bodies Back’ a team of performers choreographers and musicians consider this as a site of protest and catharsis. Our Bodies Back presents a powerful rendering of Black women’s voices; speaking out against the realities of anti-Black Our Bodies Back presents a powerful rendering of Black women’s voices; speaking out against the realities of anti-Black racism, misogyny and sexual violence, while uplifting and honouring in full the Black lives and memories lost, in a stunning ceremony of dance, spoken word and visual art.

Click here to explore set 3.

Click here to explore sets 1 & 2.

Click here for more information about The Imagined New.

“I want to call these erased bodies living corpses. In general, I posit that one work of our current intellectual labour is to think about traditions of thought that grapple with dead and erased bodies which speak … On these bodies, practices of violence were conducted that made them not sites of exception but rather sites in which regularized performances of violence as power were enacted. Yet from these bodies, seemingly corpses, there emerged a set of practices that generated thought.” (Prof Anthony Bogues 2012:34)

20 April 2022 — Announcement

Press Release: Scotland + Venice presents Alberta Whittle and ‘deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory’

The Scotland + Venice partnership is delighted to present Alberta Whittle and her new body of work deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory at Biennale Arte 2022. At a time in history when it is not enough for the world to merely acknowledge global injustice, this remarkable exhibition invites us to unravel contested and difficult histories and creates an open space for conversation, hope, healing, and reconciliation.

Presented within the purple washed walls of the exhibition, her work rings out as a beacon of hope to a world crying out for change. Unveiling three new pieces of work in film, sculpture, and tapestry, deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory is an opportunity for all who enter to confront the tough realities of police brutality, colonisation, gender and race politics and climate change. In presenting us with these uncomfortable truths, deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory seeks to enable restorative justice and self-healing.

Building on themes established in previous work, this new exhibition demonstrates the artist’s unmatched ability to tell difficult, and often painful, stories with empathy, vulnerability, and an abundance of love, something the artist is intentional about.

Alberta Whittle:

“The luxury of amnesia is a really potent idea in my practice. For so long there was this complete reluctance and avoidance in discussing Scotland’s role within slavery and within plantation economies. There’s this sense that racism and police brutality is an English problem or an American problem, something that isn’t happening on these shores. There are ways in which the luxury of amnesia has been nurtured by Governments, by the stories we tell ourselves, by ways we find to avoid our own complicity with our own privilege – and it’s interesting to think about the conversations that are still missing.

“There’s a numbness that can happen when you just see names and that endless footage of George Floyd being murdered. I wanted to find a way to think about these ideas without retraumatising myself or retraumatising the audience, and I think there are other ways to do that – and that led me to really return to love. I wanted there to be that place for love in the work because it ends at such a place of sorrow when I think about the endless list of names that are growing.

“I wanted us to really remember the names we hear in the news; we have to resist becoming numb to them. I think there needs to be a reckoning with these ideas if we are really going to make change, including re-assessing the power we give to the police – that unchecked power – and also institutional racism which is a huge part of why all of this happens.”

With much of the art world asking tough questions about what needs to be done to address its own systems of oppression, Alberta Whittle’s commission for Scotland + Venice comes at a time when cultural organisations across Scotland and the world seek to decolonise the sector.

Amanda Catto, Head of Visual Arts at Creative Scotland and Chair of the Scotland + Venice partnership said:

“The Scotland and Venice partners are delighted to be presenting this major new body of work by Alberta Whittle at one of the world’s most prestigious festivals of contemporary art, La Biennale di Venezia.

“Alberta draws us into a space where contested histories and difficult truths can be understood within frameworks of love, healing and reparation. Alberta insists that we acknowledge the enduring damage and pain caused by slavery and colonialism and that we reject the toxic legacies of violence and oppression that still impact on the lives of Black people today. Creating space for reflection, remembrance and conversation she encourages us to imagine and make possible new and alternative futures.

“La Biennale is a unique environment for the sharing of contemporary art and ideas, and it’s the perfect arena for us to share Alberta’s work and to welcome people from across continents and cultures to share their experiences and perspectives. It’s been a privilege to work with Alberta, and the many brilliant collaborators, partners and supporters who have made this project possible.  We give thanks to all involved and look forward to welcoming visitors from April through to November.”

This spirit of collaborative working is central to much of Whittle’s practice. Much like the chords in the textile fabrics of Entanglement is more than blood – a tapestry handwoven at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh and hand tied by the artist to its Biennale resting place.  Embellished with glass trading beads, whaling rope, and cowrie shells, the woven fabric tells a story of maritime trade, womxn of resistance, and nature as a protector of the oppressed.

Voices from the past and present also collide in Lagareh – The Last Born, a 40 minute film shot across multiple locations in Scotland, England, Italy, Sierra Leone and Barbados.  Co-commissioned and produced with the support of Forma, this is a moving and affecting piece that raises important questions about the effectiveness of the prison system and draws attention to the racial injustices, violence and death experienced by Black people at the hands of the police. As with much of Whittle’s work the trauma is a gateway for audiences to pause and consider the full humanity of the peoples her work captures; their hopes, their fullness, their experiences – and in doing so she presents a dialogue of renewal and love beyond the violence that is often focused on by media.

A series of sculptural gates act as framing devices in the exhibition, holding the tapestry, the film and the viewer in the space.  Fabricated in steel at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, the deep green colours of the metalwork are offset by stained glass panels in almost water-like purple and pink that nod to the colours of the glass lamps that shine across Venice. Holding formal qualities that remind us of the architecture of punishment, incarceration and human bondage the gates create moments in the space for pause, remembrance and reflection.

The artist has talked often of being drawn to the water noting that bodies of water hold the stories, lost lives and dreams of migrants, refugees, and enslaved peoples. In this work the place of water and womxn through ancestral figures such as Mami Wata are brought to life. The Mami Wata tradition survived the centuries-long Transatlantic slave system and entwined with elements of Indigenous Caribbean worship, continues to express itself in a variety of ways across the Americas. Her worship created a sense of strength and unity to fight against enslavement and retained respect for womxn as healers and leaders.

As climate change continues to demand a collective response from humanity, exploitative and hierarchical systems such as capitalism and colonialism are brought into question by deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory. With displaced communities, people of colour, and womxn most impacted by these global systems of oppression, Whittle speaks for the thousands of lives that find a place in her work – and offers self-compassion as a radical act of resistance.

Echoing the artist’s ethos of care and healing, visitors to the space will be offered items of comfort such as handmade blankets and herbal teas – created by family, friends and collaborators.  With students and early career practitioners from across Scotland and South Africa invigilating the exhibition and providing a very warm Scottish welcome to all that come to the experience of the exhibition.

Culture Secretary, Angus Robertson said:

“The Venice Biennale offers a wonderful opportunity for artists to showcase their work on the international stage and I’m delighted that Alberta Whittle will be representing Scotland at this prestigious event.

“Her thought-provoking installation, ‘deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory’, uses tapestry, film and sculpture to explore the contested and difficult histories around the legacies of slavery and racial injustice in a space that offers hope, healing and reconciliation.

“Following this year’s Biennale, we can look forward to seeing Alberta Whittle’s new work at the National Galleries of Scotland and the film of her exhibition will be screened in cinemas across Scotland.”

A key aim of the Scotland + Venice partnership is to enable audiences in Scotland to engage with the work being shown in Venice. In partnership with LUX Scotland, from late 2022, the film Lagareh – The Last Born will tour art and screening venues across Scotland. Forma will lead on a subsequent international tour of the film. Plans are also being made for the artist’s presentation to feature at the heart of a major solo show of her work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2023. Offering a compelling insight into the artist’s career to date, it will include works in a range of media alongside those shown in Venice giving the audience the opportunity to experience first-hand the ambition and breadth of Alberta’s practice.

The exhibition is presented at the Docks Cantieri Cucchini, S. Pietro di Castello, 40, 30122 a fully accessible space located between the main sites of La Biennale, the Giardini and Arsenale.

The exhibition opens to the public from 23rd April, with supporting digital programming running on the Scotland + Venice website (www.scotlandandvenice.com).  The exhibition runs through to 27th November, 2022.

Preview: Thursday 21st April, 2-5pm with speeches at 2.30pm

Press & Media Visits: Monday 18th – Friday 22nd April

Public Opening Times: Saturday 23rd April – Sunday 27th November

The exhibition is open Tuesday through to Sunday from 10am to 6pm.

The film is 40 minutes long and will be screened at 10:10, 11:00, 11:50, 12:40, 13:30, 14:20, 15:10, 16:00 and 16:50.

—

Alberta Whittle Biography

Alberta Whittle (she/ her) b. 1980 Bridgetown, Barbados. She lives and works in Glasgow. Alberta has been based in Scotland since moving here to study firstly at Edinburgh College of Art and later on the Master of Fine Arts programme at The Glasgow School of Art. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh and Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg.

Alberta was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. She was the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/19. Her work has been acquired by major public collections including the National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow Museums Collections and the Contemporary Art Research Collection at Edinburgh College of Art, as well as by other private collections.

Selected solo exhibitions and presentations include: Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2021), Liverpool Biennale (2021), Art Night London (2021), The British Art Show 9 – Aberdeen (2021), Glasgow International (2021), Glasgow International (2020), Grand Union, Birmingham (2020), Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2019), Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2019), The Tyburn Gallery, London (2019) and FADA Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2018). Selected group exhibitions include: Life Between Islands Caribbean: British Art 1950s to Now, Tate Britain (2021-22), and those held at Kunstal Trondheim, Norway (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2021), The Lisson Gallery, London (2021), MIMA Middlesborough (2021), Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada (2021), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2020), Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh (2019) and the 13th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2019). Forthcoming exhibitions for Alberta include group shows at Fotografiska, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, New York, Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden and La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain and a solo exhibition as part of British Art Show 9, Plymouth. This full presentation will return to Scotland and be exhibited with other works by Alberta at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, opening in spring 2023.

Further information on Alberta Whittle’s website: https://www.albertawhittle.com/ 

Background

Scotland + Venice provides artists and architects based in Scotland with a valuable platform to showcase their work on the international stage at the Venice Biennale and is a partnership between Creative Scotland, British Council Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland, Architecture and Design Scotland, V&A Dundee and the Scottish Government.  www.scotlandandvenice.com 

Twitter: @scotlandvenice  – https://twitter.com/scotlandvenice 

Facebook: @scotlandandvenice  – https://www.facebook.com/scotlandandvenice 

Instagram: @scotlandvenice  – https://www.instagram.com/scotlandvenice/ 

The Scotland + Venice space also features a pop-up cafe which is a reflective space for visitors to rest by the waters of Venice’s canals and consider their place in the world that Whittle presents. With water and its juxtaposing nature of transience and permanence, abundance and scarcity, peace and violence, stillness and movement, depth and shallowness, warmth and bitter coolness; the location is a perfect oasis to step away from the busyness of the Biennale and rest.

Media contact

For more information or for media requests please contact Studio Tuku: http://www.studiotuku.com/ 

Sophie Amono, sophie@studiotuku.com, +44 (0) 739 444 6305

BLACK SONIC: HERITAGE AS HERESY

THE IMAGINED NEW VOL II | theimaginednew.org

SET 2: RADICAL IMAGINATION OF THE ORDINARY

3 January 2022

Sound provides one of the ways in which relationships with the past are built and inherent rules reinforced. The Black Sonic has consistently produced various musical forms which have challenged so-called inherent rules and in so doing created fissures in what is meant by civilisation as represented by sound.

Radical Imagination of the Ordinary, considers hearing as an affective process in which feeling is firmly located at the centre. Here, Ashon Crawley's writing on blackness as being an epistemology of feeling "not against thought, but feeling as thought..." - become points of departure for thinking through the different ways in which attending to the affective qualities of the sonic might begin to present opportunities for feeling through black quotidian experiences. 

Taking into consideration that many musical traditions are birthed from and often characterised or influenced by movement and migration, set two considers movement, both at an affective and physical level to explore the different types of mobility afforded to Black folk across varying sonic practices.

Zara Julius talks about how we might begin to use frequency as a strategy for survival that aids in revealing and concealing experiences of black life and maintaining the integrity of sacred rituals. The practice of producing collective soundings (in which hearing is a key component – harmonising demands hearing and intuition which is marked by feeling), creates communion and marks recognition.

DJ Lynnée Denise’s practice is centred around exploring sonic based knowledge systems. She coined the term ‘DJ Scholarship’ which repositions the role of DJs from being party purveyors to cultural custodians that use music to create space for public dialogue in attempts to transform the understanding of music across the Black Atlantic beyond entertainment and in its social context.

Radical Imagination of the Ordinary includes:

Electric Ring Shout by DJ Lynnée Denise

Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical by Rhea Storr

click here to access this content and more.

BLACK SONIC HERITAGE AS HERESY

THE IMAGINED NEW VOL II

SET 1: BLACK PHONIC SUBSTANCE

1 December 2021

We are dropping the first selection of content in the Black Sonic Heritage as Heresy digital programme! Black Phonic Substance is a visual-sonic mixtape that uses re-worked archival media to sound out and highlight the non-lexical substance of black speech and song. Through performances by Carl Hancock Rux and Okwui Okpokwasili,  the writings of Fred Moten and Denise Ferreira Da Silva become a score; a set of symbolic pitches, rhythms and phrases. Taken together with an original composition from Vernon Reid, Black Phonic Substance hypothesizes blackness as the ongoing improvisation “that moves in excess of meaning.”

Black Sonic is not about sound or sonics as content or category, as the cultural ‘by-product’ of the black experience, but sound and sonics as a heritage of heretical praxis; as so many ways of being and becoming. By Black Sonic we thus mean (or rather, call into play) the multiple soundings, dissonances, resonances, rhythmic patterns and diasporic relays that have historically animated and continue to enunciate Black life and create new types of archives. Archives that both store and broadcast the Black Sonic. 

Through these broadcasts, the quietude of slavery and colonialism are disturbed across historical time. Similarly, these broadcasts traverse geographical space and amplify the trans-nationality of Black Lives Matter. Taken together, the Black Sonic underscores the dynamic range of Fred Moten’s “black phonic substance” and the ways in which black, brown, femme and queer people from across the African diaspora embody and make shareable its many cadences.  

As volume II of The Imagined New / Working through alternative archives, the Black Sonic presents a digital programme that will explore the Black Sonic and the heritage of heretical praxis. These praxes are the conditions for new historical imagination(s) across time and space.

Black Phonic Substance includes:

Black Wah, A Cultural Loop by Vernon Reid

Fred Moten and Denise Ferreira Da Silva an imagined conversation by Carl Hancock Rux and Okwui Okpokwasili

Shade Compositions by Rashaad Newsome

Click here to access this content.

2022 CALL FOR GLOBAL EXCELLENCE STATURE (GES) 4.0

POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS AND POSTDOTORAL FELLOWSHIPS FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (MULTI-DISCIPLINARY CALL)

As of January 2022, the Director of the Visual Art and Design Research Centre, Prof Leora Farber, will be offering Masters, PhD and post-doctoral supervision in the emergent field of bio-art/design.

This new, developing research programme is focused on theoretical and practical interactions between the life sciences, biotechnology, visual art and certain design forms. Working under the umbrella term ‘bio-art/design’ artists and designers engage with scientific processes, using non/living matter as media. Biological materials such as cells, tissues, organisms, bacteria, yeasts, and fungi are explored using a combination of artmaking /design processes and scientific procedures, protocols, and tools.

Given this, bio-art/design may be considered as a form of interdisciplinary praxis: a critical and creative visual response to the development and presence of biotechnologies and related procedures, and theoretical debates currently taking place in contemporary scientific and popular-scientific discourses, as well as in cultural imaginaries across the arts and Humanities. Practical work takes place in a custom-built, PC2 laboratory, that forms part of the FADA FABLAB. It is the first bio-art/design research laboratory of its kind in South Africa, enabling artists and designers to engage in ‘wet’ biological practices in conjunction with research into related theoretical concerns.

Funding for Masters, PhD and Post-doctoral Fellowships can be applied for under the University of Johannesburg's Global Excellence Stature (GES) 4.0 Scholarship programme (see details of the call below).

If you are interested in applying for funding or the bio-art/design programme (or both), please send a one-page statement of intent to: leoraf@uj.ac.za by 10 December 2021.

2022 Call for Global Excellence Stature (GES) 4.0

Postgraduate Scholarships and Postdoctoral Fellowships

Fourth Industrial Revolution (multi-disciplinary call)

GES 4.0 Scholarships and Fellowships are intended to encourage and support Postgraduate students and Postdoctoral Research Fellows from various disciplines. If you are interested in carrying out cutting edge research activities in a multidisciplinary approach involving multiple academic entities and aligned to industry 4.0 then this call is for you. UJ is looking for candidates who are keen to work on innovative solutions to problems related to 4IR as well as present ways to exploit the transformative potential of 4IR technologies to address the Global Sustainable Development Goals.

Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

Candidates who obtained their doctoral degrees within the last five years are invited to apply. Fellowships will be awarded on a competitive basis, considering the candidate’s academic achievements, potential as an independent researcher and meeting the requirements of the call. Successful candidates will be expected to contribute to research productivity and impact in multi-disciplinary research involving multiple academic entities

that are aligned to 4IR. Interested candidates may apply online at https://www.uj.ac.za/ges-pdrf

Master’s and Doctoral Scholarships

Applications are invited from suitably qualified candidates who will be registering for full-time master’s and doctoral studies at the University of Johannesburg in 2022. The scholarships will be awarded based on academic excellence. The call is open to candidates who intend undertaking multi-disciplinary research involving multiple academic entities that are aligned to 4IR. Race and gender demographics will be applied during the evaluation

Closing date for applications: 14 January 2022

process to enhance the equity profile of postgraduate students at UJ. Interested candidates may apply online:

Master’s: https://www.uj.ac.za/ges-master /

Doctoral: https://www.uj.ac.za/ges-doctoral

SO MUCH ‘AFRICA’ PHOTOGRAPHY, SO FEW AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS

Friday 05 November 2021

18:00 (SAST) | 19:00 (EAT) | 17:00 (CET) | 12:00 (EST)

READING THE MOMENT - PHOTOGRAPHY, POWER & ETHICS OF REPRESENTATION #3

Join us for So much 'Africa' photography, so few African photographers - the 3rd in a 3-part webinar dialogue series convened by VIAD Research Associate M. Neelika Jayawardane. Presented as part of VIAD's Reading the Moment online platform, each session gathers a community of invited artists, photographers, curators and scholars and encourages critical dialogue around the politics of representation, alternative histories and practices of photography, and the roles that arts organisations play in the recycling of racial-sexual marginalisation.

Register to attend by clicking here.

Revisit the first two sessions here.

So much photography of ‘Africa’, so few African photographers is focussed on the ways in which 'Africa' and African people continue to be imaged, imagined and presented as 'othered' peoples and locations. We hope to address the ways in which a myriad of structures maintain this imbalance of who gets to image, imagine and construct ‘African’ visual repertoires. The aim is to find ways to close the gap of accessible tools for critical education in photography and its role in racialising and othering people, and the contemporary perpetuation of colonial photographic tropes.

PANELISTS:
M. Neelika Jayawardane (facilitator)
Marwa Abou Leila | Photopia Cairo
Olfa Feki| Independent Curator
Jim Chuchu | Nest Collective
Lekgetho Makola | Javett-UP Art Centre

View panelist bios here.

Reading the Moment is a curated digital space in which VIAD Research Associates, as well as invited guests from the greater VIAD research community, can share recent presentations, projects, interviews, digital exhibitions and interactive dialogues, as creative responses to salient social and political questions of our time. Click on the button below to view Neelika's multimedia offering: Photography, Power & the Ethics of Representation

THE FRONT ROOM AT MUSEUM OF THE HOME IN LONDON - MICHAEL MCMILLAN

VIAD is pleased to congratulate our research associate Michael McMillan on the permanent installation of his work The Front Room at the Museum of the Home in London.

Emanating from the Victorian parlour, the front room embodies colonial values about gendered respectability, and feminine style of postcolonial modernity, such as crochet, which is expressed in the Black British material culture of the domestic interior.

The colour bar meant that Caribbean migrants, especially men, were not welcome in pubs, clubs and churches. They resorted to entertaining themselves with house parties playing imported music on the radiogram in the front room, which because of complaints from neighbours about the ‘noise’ were often raided and shut down by the police. 

Used by men, but dressed by women, the front room reflects the labour and creative agency of migrant and white working class women in the home. They worked hard and saved long to acquire things that elevated their self-hood as respectable women, proper wives and spouses, and proper mothers.

The front room is the public space in the private domain where the family in it’s rituals of hospitality shows to the outside world how it wants to appear to be seen.

‘No matter how poor we were, if the front room looked good, then we were respectable’ – this is not simply about migrant aesthetics in the home, but about working class respectability.  

The front room was as an aspirational space for migrant and white working class families that expressed in its material culture values such as, ‘make do until better’, deferred gratification, religious identity, educational achievement, hyper-modern style and reassurance of kitsch.

The front room was a contradictory space, with a series, such juxtapositions of alcohol and pictures of a scantily clad ‘Tina’ next to pictures of ‘The Last Supper’, colourful wallpaper that never to match equally coloured carpet. 

The front room was a site of rebellion for young people like myself, who unlike our Caribbean migrant parents, who weren’t born in Britain, and didn’t understand what it meant to grow up in the society that racially othered you. These conflicts were expressed in family responses to tabloid and television representations of external events like the uprisings/riots at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976, Brixton 1981 and Broadwater Farm 1985.

To view the installation of The Front Room ‘Inna Joburg’ click here.

To view the installation of A Front Room in 1970 click here.

To read more about Michael McMillan’s work and career click here.

To find out more about the film Waiting to Appear click here.

VIAD DIRECTOR PRESENTS NEW INSTALLATION AT THE IZIKO SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL GALLERY

VIAD is excited to announce the second iteration of disquieting domesticities, vestiges of violence (or, the ghost in the house) - an installation by VIAD Director Leora Farber. The exhibition opens this Wednesday, 19 May 2021, at the South African National Gallery (ISANG) in Cape Town.

disquieting domesticites, vestiges of violence (or, the ghost in the house) is the second in a series of installations in which Leora Farber engages intensively with bioart − an umbrella term for a range of art forms that engage critically with bioscientific research. ‘Bioartists’ mix artistic and scientific processes, using live tissues, bacteria, living organisms and life processes as media. In this installation, Farber presents a highly innovative use of biomaterials, in which impressions are made from a cellulose-fibre that is produced by the symbiotic action of Gluconacetobacter xylinus bacteria and yeast. This symbiotic culture, which feeds off a mixture of tea and sugar, forms a biofilm at the interface between the liquid nutrient and air. The biofilm grows to form a cellulose fibre that when dehydrated, bears uncanny resemblance to traces of human skin – sloughed off, shed, discarded. 

The ‘impressions’ of domestic objects in Farber’s installation hover in a liminal space of constant flux and becoming. Slipping in-between visibility and invisibility; materiality and immateriality; human and non-human; actuality and imagination; being and non-being; presence and absence, they oscillate in a state of in-betweenness. Materially corporeal yet ethereal and spectral, they appear to inhabit varying states of atrophy, acting as affective carriers of memory, possibly evoking remembrances of familiarity, intimacy, comfort, strangeness, dis-ease, vulnerability, trauma, complicity, and loss. 

Farber’s impressions reference various design styles, periods, and surface patterning. They include items taken from Chinese porcelain and English bone china; some feature blue and white patterns of Chinese origin, such as the willow pattern, which the British copied in their production of 18th century porcelain, and the Dutch reproduced in their ‘Delft blue’ porcelain. These designs have become domestic ‘classics’ in many post-settler colonies. The impressions thus resonate as spectral traces of colonial and apartheid legacies that haunt domestic interiors and broader individual and collective imaginations in post-colonial South Africa. They carry hauntological resonances of British and Dutch Imperialism and colonialism — the very mechanisms that drove the enculturation of capital. If read against this historical backdrop of dispossession, exploitation, displacement and precarity, Farber’s impressions may recall uncanny spectres of disquietude; vestiges of violence that continue to inhabit domestic spaces.

Click here for more information on intimate presences/affective absences (or, the snake within), the first installation in Farber’s series, presented by VIAD and the FADA Gallery, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg in November 2020.

CATASTROPHE :: CARTOGRAPHY | THE SOJOURNER PROJECT SOUTH AFRICA

VIAD is excited to announce Catastrophe :: Cartography as the third activation of The Sojourner Project South Africa - a Black Studies Mobile Academy. Following Frequencies of Blackness and Sovereignty, Catastrophe :: Cartography will be hosted by Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand, Torkwase Dyson, Canisia Lubrin, Kevin Adonis Browne, Dele Adeyemo & Danai Mupotsa.

The Catastrophe :: Cartography session took place on April 30th 2021. Click here to watch the recorded session!

***

Catastrophe :: Cartography will be followed by two small-group workshops, Enclosures: Blackness and Transmutation with Mabel O. Wilson and Mario Gooden as well as Frictions with Tavia Nyong'o and Keguro Macharia. More information on these workshops is forthcoming. Sign up for our mailing list for more updates!

SOVEREIGNTY | THE SOJOURNER PROJECT SOUTH AFRICA

Following Frequencies of Blackness, Sovereignty is the 2nd activation of The Sojourner Project South Africa - a Black Studies Mobile Academy. Sovereignty was recently hosted by Practicing refusal member and VIAD RA Deborah A. Thomas, together with Gabrielle Goliath, Savannah Shange & Khwezi Mkhize.

The Sovereignty listening session took place on February 25th 2021. Click here to watch the recorded session!

For more information on the Sojourner Project and the Practicing Refusal collective, click here. Visit: www.thesojournerproject.org

ERICA MOIAH JAMES GRANTEE OF THE ANDY WARHOL WRITERS GRANT

Congratulations to our research associate Erica Moiah James on being a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grantee!

Erica Moiah James’s article “Juan Francisco Elso: La luz de las cosas / The Light of Things” will focus on the late Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso, who was part of a group of young artists that redirected the path of contemporary Cuban art in the 1980s with the exhibition Volumen I.

You can read the Arts Writer’s Grant review here.

VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH TRACEY EMIN: ART INTO LIFE

Please join us to celebrate the publication of Tracey Emin: Art into Life, a collection of essays by renowned scholars, curators, and theorists on one of the most famous and controversial artists of our time. Despite Emin’s celebrity, her work rarely receives the critical attention it so thoroughly deserves. The book’s editors, Deborah Cherry and our research associate Alexander Kokoli.

Alev Adil, Glenn Adamson, Jo Heath, and Camilla Jalving, to discuss our approach to the artist, her work, and the space between them, followed by questions from the audience. The event will be introduced by NYUL's Director, Professor Catherine Robson, and chaired by Alice Correia.

The virtual book launch of Tracey Emin: Art into Life (Bloomsbury 2020) will be hosted by NYU London on Thursday 3 December 2020, 6:00pm until 7:30pm.

Click here to RSVP. For more information on the book click here.

FREQUENCIES OF BLACKNESS | THE SOJOURNER PROJECT SOUTH AFRICA

VIAD is excited to announce Frequencies of Blackness, a Listening Session as the first activation of The Sojourner Project / South Africa. Presented by Tina Campt, Zara Julius, Jenn Nkiru & Alexander Weheliye, this listening session explores black frequency as a site of possibility. It engages black frequency in multiple forms: as a sonic space that ranges from silence to deafening, dissonant noise; as a register of ecstatic rapture and spirituality; as a temporal feedback loop of memory, repetition, and renewal; as a dynamic relation of call and response, or chorus and verse; as a haptic and kinetic space of contact and connection across the African continent and its various diasporas.

The Frequencies of Blackness listening session took place on November 20th 2020. Click here to watch the recorded session!

For more information on the Sojourner Project and the Practicing Refusal collective, click here. Visit: www.thesojournerproject.org

BULLETPROOFING AMERICAN HISTORY

Mabel O. Wilson publishes an article on how historical narratives of black life are disseminated in relation to anti-black violence. The article titled, Bulletproofing American History asks how do we monumentalise and remember acts of brutality enacted on black bodies? And who gets to do the remembering?

Read the rest of the article on eflux.

CFP: CHANTS, DREAMS & OTHER GRAMMARS OF LOVE

VIAD is honoured to share this CFP, for a commemorative anthology celebrating the life and work of Professor Harry Oludare Garuba (1958-2020); poet, literary scholar, teacher, mentor, and beloved friend to many.

Please send single or multiple submissions of poems, stories, tributes and artwork to: othergrammarsoflove@gmail.com, and copy remiraji at gmail.com. Please send your entry only in word format (not PDF) and indicate your full or pen name and affiliation. (Artwork only in jpeg format).Submissions are accepted until October 30, 2020. Editorial Team: Remi Raji, Josephine Alexander, Oyeniyi Okunoye, Natasha Himmelman, Bongani Kona and Idowu Omoyele.

IN THE TIME OF NOW, SOCIAL IS ALL IMPORTANT. AN ARTICLE BY ANTHONY BOGUES.

VIAD is excited to announce that Anthony Bogues will be contributing regularly to the Mail&Guardian, who are launching a new section on anti-colonial thought and human rights. This follows the M&G’s recent re-publication of Bogues’ article, Black Critique – Black Lives Matter, Breath and Human Life, first released as part of VIAD’s new Reading the Moment platform.

Click here to read Bogues latest M&G article, In the time of the now, social is all important. In this timeous contribution, Bogues critiques the individualistic framework of western social and political life, locating its basis of rights and government in the inequitable and racially/sexually hierarchised logics of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. By contrast, he locates and advocates for a certain politics of the social, as a set of practices and approaches articulated in Frantz Fanon’s ‘world of the You’, and currently reflected in the everyday responses of protection and care demonstrated by ordinary black, brown and immigrant people whose unseen labour is only now being celebrated as ‘essential service’.

ALBERTA WHITTLE NAMED AS RECIPIENT OF THE FRIEZE ARTIST AWARD 2020

Congratulations to VIAD Research Associate, Alberta Whittle who has been named as the recipient of the Frieze Artist Award 2020.

Whittle’s creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces. Her winning proposal features a new moving-image work, informed by the writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and an interest in connecting gothic imaginaries and fear of contagion with moral panic as it relates to colonialism and xenophobia.

For more info on the screening visit FRIEZE.

DR ALEXANDRA KOKOLI RECIPIENT OF THE LEVERHULME RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

VIAD Research Associate Dr Alexandra Kokoli (Middlesex University, UK) has been awarded a research fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for her work on the art and visual activism at Greenham Common.

Congratulations to Dr Kokoli!

NEELIKA JAYAWARDANE COMMEMORATES PHOTOGRAPHER GEORGE HALLETT

The legendary South African photographer passed away on the 1st of July 2020, at the age of 77. In this op-ed piece, Jayawardane, revisits the photographer’s work and his contribution to South Africa’s photographic history.

Read the rest of the article here.

ALBERTA WHITTLE WINS THE TURNER PRIZE BURSARY

Congratulations to artist and VIAD RA Alberta Whittle! Whittle is one of the recipients for the 2020 Turner Prize Bursaries, in place of the the annual staging of an exhibition at The Tate.

Read more here.

JAMES BARNOR, EVER YOUNG - BY RENÉE MUSSAI

(For)ever Young: Happy 91st Birthday James Barnor! VIAD RA and Autograph Senior Curator Renée Mussai reflects on the legacy of the legendary Ghanaian photographer, and his first major gallery exhibition ten years ago at Autograph.

Click here to to read the blog, and here to download a complimentary James Barnor, Forever Young newspaper from the Autograph website.

OP-ED PIECE BY ALEXANDER KOKOLI: GREENHAM COMMON AND RACE

On her virtual feminist museum platform dedicated to the women of Greenwich Museum, VIAD RA, Alexander Kokoli shares a list of resources that speak to issues of race in the camp.

You can visit the museum here.

THIS IS AMERICA: BLACK LIVES - STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE, PROTEST & CHANGE

VIAD is privileged to share this series of urgent conversations, presented by the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), Brown University, Providence. VIAD collaborates closely with the CSSJ, and is thankful to CSSJ Director and VIAD Visiting Professor & Curator Anthony Bogues for opening this programme to our community.

Please note that the advertised conversation times are for 4pm EST - this equates to 10pm CAT. This event is free and open to all, register here.

IMAGINING EVERYDAY LIFE: ENGAGEMENTS WITH VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY. NEW BOOK EDITED BY TINA CAMPT

Steidl has recently published a book on vernacular photography, edited by VIAD RA Tina Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis. Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements With Vernacular Photography.

The book is co-published with The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm and New York and is available here.

COVID-19: SPATIAL PLAN AND HUMAN SETTLEMENT ENTERPRISE IN SOUTH AFRICA. AN OP-ED PIECE BY LUVUYO DONDOLO.

Dr Luvuyo Dondolo, VIAD RA opines on what the current COVID-19 pandemic reveals of South Africa’s spatial planning and the human settlement enterprise. 

Read the rest of the article here.

COVID19 & LGBTQI PEOPLE IN SOUTH AFRICA

As organisers of the Lesser Violence Reading Group, VIAD and GALA are calling on their respective communities to respond to this call for support. LGBTQI people and communities are rendered extremely vulnerable by the isolating conditions of lockdown, which continue in the current phased return to 'ordinary living'. Many LGBTQI individuals find themselves further ostracised, or otherwise constrained within toxic, very often violence environments. The home space is not necessarily a safe space, nor do the particular concerns and needs of LGBTQI communities feature high on the agenda of government or aid responses to the pandemic. Please click HERE to donate.

THE HUMAN: AN ALTERNATIVE GROUND FOR ‘DEVELOPMENT’. ANTHONY BOGUES SPEAKS TO THE UN AND ISC

In seeking to ‘re-articulate Human Development’, the UN Development Programme and International Science Council recently approached and interviewed VIAD Visiting Professor and Curator Anthony Bogues, whose scholarly and curatorial work has consistently foregrounded questions of history, freedom and ‘the human’ in relation to radical Black thinking and creative practice.

To read the full interview click here.

VIAD: RESPONDING TO THE CHALLENGE OF COVID19

The impact of COVID19 on human lives, communities and ways of life can hardly be underestimated. Faced with international travel restrictions, university closures and a national shut-down, VIAD is re-evaluating all of its programmes and plans. A number of projects and publications will be deferred, and some will be entirely re-thought. VIAD will nevertheless continue to promote critical thinking and engagement around the work of its diverse research community.

Updates will be posted to the VIAD website and announced via our mailing list (to subscribe please fill in the subscription ‘sign up’ to the right).

SURAFEL WONDIMU ABEBE, CO-CONVENER OF THE AFRICA INSTITUTE’S ETHIOPIA MODERN NATION ANCIENT ROOTS SCHOLARLY AND CULTURAL SEASON OCTOBER 2019 - MAY 2020

As part of its annual public programming, The Africa Institute for the academic year 2019-2020 has organised a season of scholarly, cultural and artistic activities in various media and genres focusing on Ethiopia as a first in a series of seasons.

VIAD RA Surafel Wondimu Abebe is co-convener, alongside Elizabeth Giorgis (University of Addis Ababa) and Dagmawi Woubshet (University of Pennsylvania) of The Africa institute’s Ethiopia Modern Nation Ancient Roots Scholarly and Cultural Season October 2019 - May 2020. The two part interdisciplinary scholarly conference comprises of scholarly lectures, film screenings, music performances, exhibitions and a play held in Sharjah, UAE in March 2020, with the second part taking place in Addis Ababa in May 2020.

For more on the programming visit the AI.

UNFIXED: PHOTOGRAPHY AND DECOLONIAL IMAGINATION IN WEST AFRICA, A NEW BOOK BY JENNIFER BAJOREK

Last year we announced our Research Associate, Jennifer Bajorek, as the recipient of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund Award, for her book Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in west Africa, the book has been recently published and is now available via Duke University Press. Congratulations Jennifer!

Jennifer Bajorek is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Hampshire College and Research Associate in the VIAD Research Centre, in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. She is also author of Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony (2008).

The book is available here.

THE WORLD AFTER US: IMAGINING TECHNO-AESTHETIC FUTURES

The World After Us is a solo exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art | Downtown  – Milwaukee by VIAD Research Associate Nathaniel Stern. The show prompts us to imagine what the world might look like when humans seize to exist, with all the electronic waste we would have left behind. Tightly weaved within the show, are questions aroud the relationship between humans and the natural world, politics and commerce.

The show opened January 2020 and is on until March 2020.

Read the review on wired here.

MAKING ALTERNATIVE FREEDOMS: SLAVERY, FREEDOM AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

Anthony Bogues, visiting professor at VIAD, recently gave a public lecture at the University of Glasgow on slavery and the notion of liberty as a modern project.

Professor Bogues is the inaugural director at Brown University’s Centre for Slavery and Justice, a research centre which emerged from Brown University’s investigation into its connections to slavery and the slave trade.

ALBERTA WHITTLE ANNOUNCED AS PARTICIPATING ARTIST FOR THE 2020 LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL

Research Associate at VIAD and Artist, Alberta Whittle, has been announced as one of more than fifty leading international artists to take part in the 11th Liverpool Biennial titled, The Stomach and the Port. The thematic for this year’s curatorial undertaking looks at the body and ways of connecting with the world:

Liverpool Biennial is the UK’s largest festival of contemporary visual art. Taking over historic buildings, unexpected spaces and art galleries, the Biennial has been transforming the city through art for over two decades. A dynamic programme of free exhibitions, performances, screenings and fringe events unfolds over the 15 weeks, shining a light on the city’s vibrant cultural scene.

Read more on the biennial’s programming here.

THE SILENT REVOLUTIONARY: AN INTERVIEW WITH JUDY ANN SEIDMAN

Sipho Mdanda, VIAD Research Associate, interviews artist Judy Ann Seidman on what it means to make social and politically engaged art, how she has maintained a career as a ‘revolutionary artist’ and why it is important to give voice to those who have been denied one through her work. 

Judy Ann Seidman is a visual artist and cultural activist with a long history of producing politically and socially engaged work. Born in the USA in 1951, she moved with her parents to newly independent Ghana and subsequently lived most of her life in the frontline states, before moving to South Africa in 1990.

To read the interview visit ASAI.

ALBERTA WHITTLE CONTEMPORARY& AMÉRICA LATINA INTERVIEW 

Artist and VIAD RA Alberta Whittle is featured on the latest edition of Contemporary And América Latina, in conversation with Raquel Villar-Pérez, Spanish art curator and art writer. She speaks on the need for collective healing, frightening legacies, and the Caribbean artistic scene.

Contemporary And América Latina is a dynamic, critical art magazine focusing on the connection between Afro-Latin America, The Caribbean and Africa.

Read the interview here.

THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD, REIMAGINED

The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined is an exhibition that commemorates the seminal work of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s historical novel, The Kingdom of This World (1949). The show is curated by Lesley A. Wolff, and is organised by Marie Vickles, artist and VIAD Research Associate Édouard Duval Carrié, as part of the Global / Borderless Caribbean Exhibitions for Miami Art Week. The show will run from the 6th of December 2019 until the 20th of January 2020 at the Little Haiti Cultural Center’s Satellite Gallery, Miami, Florida.

Click here for more information.

THE VISUAL LIFE OF SOCIAL AFFLICTION

The Visual Life of Social Affliction is an exhibition organised by Small Axe, curated by David Scott and VIAD Research Associate, Erica Moiah James. It is presented in partnership with the Haitian Cultural Art Alliance and is a part of ArtBasel Miami ‘s VIP programme, under the rubric of the 11th Global/Borderless Caribbean series. The exhibition features artists and writers engaged with the long standing experiences of social suffering in the Caribbean and will run from the 6th of December until the 20th of Feb 2020 at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex Gallery.

For more info visit Small Axe and the event page here.

THE ART OF EMBEDDED HISTORIES, AN EXHIBITION BY ARTIST EDOUARD DUVAL-CARRIÉ

The exploration of the complex history of slavery, colonialism, race, migration and religion in Haiti and the broader Caribbean culminates in an exhibit titled ‘The Art of Embedded Histories’ by artist Edouard Duval-Carrié curated by VIAD Visiting Professor Anthony Bogues. The show is at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and the Cohen Gallery in Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. The dual installation opened on the 29th of October and runs until December 13th 2019. 

For more information on the exhibition, please see the Center for the Study of Slavery page here.

NORMALISING THE ABNORMAL – A CASE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENTIAL POLITICAL PARDON BY LUVUYO DONDOLO

VIAD RA Luvuyo Dondolo in his article, on normalising the abnormal of the South African Presidential political pardon, writes on the socio-political nature of the presidential pardon and the manner in which it still espouses colonial and apartheid legacies.

Click here to read the article.

LONDON BOOK LAUNCH / YVETTE GRESLÉ’S ‘UNEARTHED’

VIAD Research Associate, Yvette Greslé will be launching her book titled Unearthed, on the 24th of October 2019. The event will take place Upstairs at the Island Queen in London. The book explores ‘memory as force’ with contributions from Shiraz Bayjoo, Jane Bustin, Cecile Malaspina, Denise Wong and Aurella Yussuf.

‘I grew up with the ordinariness of the colonial order of things and the banality of apartheid in the spaces where other whites, like me, lived …’ Unearthed demonstrates, through a weave of time and place – be it then or now, the Seychelles, Johannesburg or London – how the ‘ordinariness’ of prejudice and violence persists. Raising memory from burden to force, this book pulls you in and takes you to an understanding of why it is important to speak.

Yvette Greslé is a writer and art historian based in London. Her endeavours relate to the transformative and political possibilities of the moving image and writing as memory work. She is a Research Associate at VIAD, with the University of Johannesburg.

Click here for details on the launch.

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE ‘TRAUMA AND REPAIR IN THE MUSEUM’

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Special issue editors:

Dr. Alexandra Kokoli, Middlesex University, a.kokoli@mdx.ac.uk

Dr. Maria Walsh, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, m.walsh@chelsea.arts.ac.uk

A long-contested cultural space, the museum is beginning to be recognised as a battleground not only of competing understandings of its remit and value, but also, more literally, as material documentation of real violence. Artefacts obtained through imperialist invasion and looting are interpellated through the museum into material evidence of the supremacy and worthiness of the colonisers, thus perpetuating the legacies of empire and consolidating them into current global inequalities. Museums help convert real violence into symbolic tensions and divisions within the communities they purport to serve. 

The modern museum’s ‘hidden’ origin in violence, both in its histories of looting and in its use of objects to tell and/or preserve stories about nationhood, also relates to current debates in the contemporary art museum. This special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, focuses on the unconscious roots and ramifications of museological origins, histories and practices, addressed through any school of psychoanalytic thought, from both clinical and academic perspectives. Whose stories are visible in these spaces and how do they serve their audiences? Art museums naturalise the socio-cultural biases of the canon by inculcating standards of taste, aesthetics, and value in their audiences, and mapping implicit hierarchies within their displays or, more poignantly, between what is on display and what remains in storage. The critical discourse of contestation, which exposes and unpacks the mutual implication of collections, institutions, and displays with patriarchy, colonialism and racial capitalism, has gradually morphed into lively negotiation in which curators, artists, and stakeholders explore and campaign for new ways of understanding the histories and publics assembled herein.

As part of this new understanding, the therapeutic potential of engaging with museum collections and exhibitions is also being explored from psychodynamic, object-relations, and other perspectives (e.g. Froggett and Trustram, 2014). The emphasis here is often on reparation, which raises questions about the interrelationship between the political and the therapeutic, especially in relation to communities of trauma (Brown, 2004) for whom reparation can be a further act of violence. Can the museum house the narratives of pain and displacement held by objects in ways that acknowledge the rupture of trauma, but also present more entangled symbolic relations between cultures and publics? Artist Kader Attia’s concept of repair in his vast installation The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012) is a practical model of how exchange between and across cultures might be rethought in terms of the psychosocial dynamics of identification and desire.  

Contemporary curatorial thinking and practice confronts some of the most complex questions of museology and heritage studies in which practical considerations of conservation interweave with philosophical and political reflections on transience, memory, and commemoration. How might psychoanalytic thinking enable both a regenerative approach to such questions and a critical lens through which to examine the inherent ‘goodness’ thought to reside in object relations? Last but not least, psychoanalysis offers a toolkit through which to examine the strength of feeling, i.e. the passionate attachments, that curatorial decisions, acquisitions, de-acquisitions, and reclassifications inspire in their publics, particularly in the case of national and civic collections. 

This special issue aims to combine academic article-length contributions (6,000-8,000 words) with shorter interventions (1,500-3,000) by academic writers, artists, activists, and curators on current and pressing case studies or issues, including but not limited to:

• The museum as site of trauma

• The museum as site of repair and/or reparations

• The therapeutic potential of museums

• Affect in the museum, e.g. museological cathexis and decathexis

• Object relations in the museum

• Reparative aesthetics; reparative pedagogy

• Scandals in the museum (such as: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/mar/19/hylas-nymphs-manchester-art-gallery-sonia-boyce-interview)

• Protest in the museum (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/arts/design/emmett-till-whitney-biennial-schutz.html)

• Matters of life and death, including the ethics of ownership of human and animal remains

• Matters of ‘life’ and ‘death’, including philosophical and/or curatorial approaches to conservation

• Reactivating the archive as psychosocial praxis

Situated at the intersection between psychoanalysis and the social world, submissions are expected to fulfil the mission statement of the journal in mobilising the psychoanalytic toolkit to bring about positive social change, through analysis and/or proposals of models for future practice (https://www.palgrave.com/gp/journal/41282/authors/aims-scope).

Please submit an ABSTRACT of 300-500 words and a BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE of up to 100 words to the special issue editors by 9 December 2019.  Authors will be notified of the outcome of their proposal in January 2020. First full drafts will be due in June 2020.

CONGRATULATIONS TO SAIDIYA HARTMAN ON HER MACARTHUR 'GENIUS' GRANT AWARD

VIAD would like to congratulate Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at Columbia University, on this prestigious recognition. The MacArthur fellowship, is given out annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. 

Hartman was one of the participants at our Imagined New colloquium held in May and will also be collaborating with us on The Sojourner Project to be held next year. It has been a pleasure working with you!

For more information on the award please see the announcement of the award here, and the complete list of the other MacArthur Foundation fellowship and grant awardees.

VIAD DIRECTOR GIVES ARTIST TALK AT SYMBIOTICA BIOLOGICAL ARTS – UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Leora Farber, Director at VIAD is currently on residence at the University of Western Australia, at their SymbioticA artistic laboratory. On Thursday the 19th of September 2019, she will be presenting a talk on her artistic practice and latest body of work , Intimate presences/affective absences (or, the snake within).

For more information, visit the Symbiotica website here.

VIAD STANDS WITH UJ AGAINST XENOPHOBIA

The University of Johannesburg joins the national call to stop all acts of violence, intolerance and xenophobia.  The assaults on people and the looting of property simply because they were not born in South Africa can never be justified.

The violence, coming on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, is a serious blight for a country like ours, which is founded on the values of Ubuntu.

In South Africa, where foreigners are easy targets, we need to exercise caution and act with restraint, even in the midst of the social and economic problems we face. We should desist from peddling inflammatory rhetoric and hate speech that foment violence, because violence never solves any problems. As the saying goes, violence begets violence.

We support the view of the President, Mr Cyril Ramaphosa, who said: "The people of our country want to live in harmony. Whatever concerns or grievances we may have, we need to handle them in a democratic way. There can be no justification for any South African to attack people from other countries."

At UJ, we recognise the intellectual and cultural contribution that students and scholars from Africa and other parts of the world make to our University and society at large, and we remain steadfast in providing a safe and welcoming environment for all its staff and students. 

As aptly captured in our University's values, we must practice mutual respect and inspire our community to transform and serve humanity.

Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, Vice-Chancellor and Principal

UJ CONDEMNS GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE

The University of Johannesburg is gravely concerned at the recent spate of Gender-Based Violence (GBV),especially the ever increasing incidences of attacks on women and children in public and private spheres.

The recent incidents, the latest being the deadly attack on the University of Cape Town student – 19-year-old Uyinene Mrwetyana is chilling, and every parent’s worst nightmare. It is unacceptable, and indeed abhorrent that women must fear the act of simply walking in the streets. It is also unacceptable that women and girls, often the vulnerable members of our society, must continue to experience rape, sexual harassment, assault and murder in the hands of even those they trust. 

UJ, therefore, condemns in the strongest possible terms these continuous attacks on women and girls that are taking place across the country. Violence against women and girls robs them of their futures, harms families, communities, societies and institutions across generations.

It is also concerning that while the government has taken measures to develop laws, policies and programmes to respond to GBV, it remains one of the most prevalent human-rights violations in the country. We believe that effective prosecution of perpetrators is an important deterrent that must be reinforced. 

The rights of women and children in particular, are fundamental rights that our society needs to take responsibility for and protect. GBV creates a climate of fear by victimising instead of empowering women and girls. We have to continue to educate our people and prosecute those that do not learn to respect the dignity and rights of others.

Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, Vice-Chancellor and Principal

ALBERTA WHITTLE’S SOLO SHOW AT DUNDEE CONTEMPORARY ARTS

Alberta Whittle’s show at the Dundee Contemporary Arts (Scotland) explores history, colonisation and it’s aftermaths. The show titled How flexible can we make the mouth runs from the 12th of September till the 24th of November 2019. The exhibition draws together her recent works on performance and memory and postcolonial legacies.  

This marks the Bajan-Scottish artist’s first major solo in a UK institution. The show’s curator, Eoin Dara,  has this to say of the fact:

For more information, see the Dundee Contemporary Arts website here.

RENÉE MUSSAI CURATES CONCEPTUAL ARTIST LINA IRIS VIKTOR’S FIRST MAJOR SOLO EXHIBITION IN THE UK

Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter (13 September 2019 - 25 January 2020) is the first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK of the British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor. Curated by [ VIAD RA ] Renée Mussai (Senior Curator & Head of Curatorial, Archive & Research at Autograph), the site-specific immerse exhibition features more than 60 works, which will be shown at Autograph's galleries in Shoreditch, London. Many of the works will be on display for the first time, and include a new Artist Commission.

For the exhibition, Autograph has commissioned four new unique works on paper by the artist which will form part of her ongoing Dark Continent series.

These new works will enter the Autograph Archive, which form part of their unique collection of photographic material which reflects Autograph's mission: “to use photography to explore questions of cultural identity, race, representation, human rights and social justice”.

An artist monograph publication is also forthcoming, October 2019. Edited by the curator Renée Mussai, with texts by Emmanuel Iduma, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Christina Sharpe, and an in-depth conversation between Lina Iris Viktor and Renée Mussai. The monograph is published by Autograph with supportof Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago.

NEELIKA JAYAWARDANE OP-ED PIECE IN JOURNAL FOR AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

VIAD RA Prof M. Neelika Jayawardane in her op-ed piece in the Journal of African Studies, writes on the value of capacity-building-workshops hosted by European collaborators under the guise of imparting knowledge and questions whether those workshops are beneficial or merely entrench ‘colonial extractive relationships’.

Click here to read the article

JENNIFER BAJOREK, 2019 SPRING MILLARD MEISS PUBLICATION FUND AWARDS RECIPIENT

Congratulations to VIAD RA Jennifer Bajorek who was recently announced a recipient of the prestigious Millard Meiss Publication Fund Award, for her 2019 publication Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Duke University Press).

Click here for more information on the Millard Meiss Publication Fund Award. View Jennifer Bajorek’s bio

‘BUSINESS AS USUAL’ A SOLO EXHIBITION BY ALBERTA WHITTLE AT TYBURN GALLERY, LONDON

Artist and VIAD Research Associate Alberta Whittle has an upcoming solo exhibition entitled Business As Usual at the Tyburn Gallery in London. A multi-faceted artist whose practice includes film, performance, and various forms of collage and assemblage, Whittle is known for work which uses the body as a site of potential for transformation and resistance. Creating space to acknowledge the effects of history on the present, she envisions new models for the future, drawing on science fiction, decolonial knowledge, and the power of vulnerability.

The exhibition will run from 31 May – 27 July 2019.

For more information on the exhibition, please see the Tyburn Gallery website here.

‘SOMNYAMA NGONYAMA, HAIL THE DARK LIONESS’ PUBLICATION WINS TOP AWARD

The VIAD team would like to extend their congratulations to Research Associate Renée Mussai for her work on Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness!

A collaboration with Renée Mussai (Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial, Archive & Research at Autograph), Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (Aperture, 2018) was recently announced by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation as the winner of the Best Photography Book Award 2019. The book comprises 100 photographs from Zanele Muholi’s internationally renowned travelling exhibition, also curated by Mussai, currently on view at the Seattle Art Museum, USA. It features an in-depth In Conversation text-work between Muholi and Mussai, as well ascontributions from Unoma Azuah, Milisuthando Bongela, Ama Josephine Budge, Cheryl Clarke, Fariba Derakhshani, Andiswa Dlamini, Christine Eyene, Tamar Garb, Thelma Golden, Sophie Hackett, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Peace Kiguwa, Mapula Lehong, Sindiwe Magona, Napo “Popo” Masheane, Hlonipha Mokoena, Jackie Mondi, Renée Mussai, Pumelela “Push” Nqelenga, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Ruti Talmor, Christie van Zyl, Carla Williams, and Deborah Willis. 

For more information on the book and the award, please see the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation website here.

CONGRATULATIONS TO CHERYL FINLEY IN HER NEW APPOINTMENT

VIAD is proud to announce that Research Associate Prof Cheryl Finely has been appointed as Distinguished Inaugural Visiting Director of the Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies. She will be leading a new program at the AUC aimed at building a pipeline for students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to impact the museum professions and the art world by majoring in art history or minoring in curatorial studies at the undergraduate level and being prepared through internships and art intensive programs to attend graduate school (MA/PhD programs in Art History, Curatorial Studies and Museum Studies) or obtain jobs in museums, galleries and the larger art world professions.

For more information on the Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies, please see this link.

JENNIFER BAJOREK FEATURED SPEAKER AT MOMA FORUM ON CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY

Associate Professor Jennifer Bajorek presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, as a featured speaker at ‘photographic representations and colonial discourses’ on 10 April 2019. The event formed part of MoMA’s forums on contemporary photography, which was founded in 2010.

Read an article about the Forums from Art in America.

To watch the recording of ‘Photographic Representations and Colonial Discourses’ please visit the MoMA website here.

‘VIVAN SUNDARAM IS NOT A PHOTOGRAPHER’: A NEW BOOK BY RUTH ROSENGARTEN

VIAD is proud to announce the release of ‘Vivan Sundaram Is Not A Photographer: The Photographic Works Of Vivan Sundaram’, a new book by research associate Dr Ruth Rosengarten, published by Tulika Books, Dehli.

The London launch of the book will be hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies on 29 May 2019. If you are able to attend the launch, more information can be found here.

ALEXANDRA KOKOLI AWARDED PAUL MELLON CENTRE MID-CAREER FELLOWSHIP

Dr Alexandra Kokoli, senior lecturer in visual culture at Middlesex University London and research associate at VIAD, has been awarded a mid-career fellowship by the Paul Mellon Centre. The award consists of a 4-month remission from teaching and administration to be used towards the completion of her book project The Virtual Feminist Museum of Greenham Common, the first-ever monograph dedicated to the art and visual activism of the Greenham common women’s peace camp (1981-2000).

For more information on the award please see the announcement of the award here, and the complete list of the other Paul Mellon fellowship and grant awardees.

IN MEMORIAM: COUZE VENN / CELEBRATING A LIFE’S WORK

It is with great sadness that VIAD announces the passing of Couze Venn, whose ten-year association with the centre profoundly influenced its research culture and direction. After a long and courageous struggle, Couze was admitted to the Rowcroft Hospice in Torquay (UK), where he died on 13 March 2019.

Just a few weeks ago, and despite serious health struggles, Couze Venn published an opinion piece in Open Democracy. From working conditions to welfare policies, from immigration to the internet, he demonstrated (and historically located) neoliberalism’s normalised economy of hostility as a zero sum game of winners and losers, whose only beneficiaries are the far right.

Click here to read the full tribute in Theory, Culture & Society article and here to read his Open Democracy piece

CSSJ / A LEGACY OF SCHOLARSHIP

Brown University recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Centre for The Study of Slavery & Justice (CSSJ). The centre was founded in 2012 by VIAD Visiting Professor Anthony Bogues (bio), following a commission initiated in 2003 by brown’s then president, Ruth J. Simmons, which tasked a steering committee to examine the university’s historical entanglement with slavery and the slave trade. In addition to the work it does within Brown, the CSSJ supports a range of research and curatorial projects focused on histories of racial slavery, its legacies, and its ramifications for the present. VIAD and the CSSJ will collaborate this year on an exhibition and public programme curated by Bogues and featuring renowned Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié.

Click here for Gillian Kiley’s article on the CSSJ

PRIYA RAMRAKHA / THE LONG-AWAITED BOOK

With the support of 386 Kickstarter backers, Shravan Vidyarthi and VIAD RA Erin Haney are thrilled to announce the publication of ‘Priya Ramrakha - A Photo Book from a Forgotten Archive’. The books were printed in Heidelberg, Germany, in late October and bound shortly after that. The first copies travelled to Paris photo in November, and the book is now available via Amazon (link).

In October 2017 VIAD hosted the first comprehensive survey Ramrakha’s work. View exhibition details here.

AMOHELANG MOHAJANE / NEW CURATOR AT NWU GALLERY

VIAD is thrilled at the appointment of Amohelang Mohajane as the new curator of the NWU Gallery, North West University, Potchefstroom. As VIAD’S 2018 curatorial intern, Amohelang was an integral part of the centre’s programming. We wish her all the best in this new and well-deserved position, and look forward to future collaborations!

‘DISCERNING PHOTOGRAPHY’S WHITE GAZE’

VIAD RA Prof John Edwin Mason recently took to twitter, criticising the perpetuation of the white gaze in the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait competition (its most recent winner was the much-criticised South African ex-pat photographer Alice Mann). Although promoting itself as a leading international competition - “which celebrates and promotes the very best in contemporary portrait photography from around the world” - the demographic of past winners speaks to a problematic ethnographic legacy in which white artists benefit from the aesthetic commodification of black and brown bodies. Hyperallergic picked up on the story and interviewed Prof Mason:

Click here for Jasmine Weber’s Hyperallergic’s article, Discerning Photography’s White Gaze - The three top winners of the prestigious Taylor Wessing Prize depict people of color, photographed by white photographers.

NYU BOOK LAUNCH / CHERYL FINLEY'S 'COMMITTED TO MEMORY' 

Cornell University Art Historian & VIAD RA Prof Cheryl Finley's new publication - Committed To Memory. The Art of The Slave Ship Icon - will be launched at New York University on Thursday the 13th sept. Presenting this remarkable contribution, Prof Finley will be in conversation Jennifer L. Morgan, chair, Department of Social And Cultural Analysis-NYU. 

Click here for details on the launch

Click here for the recent Cornell Chronicle feature

GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE AND ART IN THE #MeToo ERA 

VIAD RA Prof M. Neelika Jayawardane writes on the responsibility of art institutions in relation to gender-based violence perpetrated by 'star' artists - citing the current controversy around South African artist Mohau Modisakeng.

Click here to read her Al Jazeera feature

View Prof. Neelika Jayawardane's bio

NEW BOOK PUBLICATIONS BY VIAD RAs 

VIAD is thrilled to announce a number of important new book publications authored and/or edited by research associates Cheryl Finley, Kimberly Lamm, Nathaniel Stern, Bryan Trabold and Couze Venn. 

CHERYL FINLEY (bio)

/ Committed to Memory. The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press - link)

KIMBERLY LAMM (bio) 

/ Addressing the other woman. Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing (Manchester University Press - link)

NATHANIEL STERN (bio)

/ Ecological Aesthetics - artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (Dartmouth College Press - link)

BRYAN TRABOLD (bio)

/ Rhetorics of Resistance. Opposition Journalism in Apartheid South Africa (University of Pittsburgh Press - link)

COUZE VENN (bio)

/ After Capital (Sage Publishing - link)

READ OUR NEWSLETTER

Click here for news on the exciting projects our Research Associates are working on.