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Afriques Capitales/Capital Africas: A Barthesian multiplicity of cities presented at La Villette in Paris
The curatorial challenge Simon Njami set for himself when conceptualizing the exhibition “Afriques Capitales“[“Capital Africas”] was to provide a discursive, dialogical space where contemporary visual artists from continental Africa and the wider global African diaspora(s) could come together to “invent the city of all cities: a city that belongs to no one but in which everyone can find…
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Exhibition Mondialité at the Villa Empain, Brussels (until August 2017)
Late Cuban artist Wifredo Lam is among the artists included in the exhibition entitled “Mondialité,” featuring visual artworks and spaces, documentary film, songs, dramaturgical structures, and archival material. The exhibition “aims to bring visitors into contact with Édouard Glissant’s thought,” and is realized with the collaboration and support of Sylvie Sema Glissant and the Institut…
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British Black Art in the 1980s: Visualising the Political Aesthetics of Sufferation, Resistance and Liberation
PRELUDE: Reflections from Stuart Hall about the history and significance of the British ‘Black Art’ movement during the 1980s: “This new ‘horizon’ produced a polemical and politicised art: a highly graphic, iconographic art of line and montage, cut-out and collage, image and slogan: the ‘message’ often appearing too pressing, too immediate, too literal, to brook…
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Women, Feminism, Art and Aesthetic Liberation: Innovative Pedagogies and Practices
Earlier this year as part of my visit to the USA to present at the College Art Association (CAA) annual conference in New York I was pleased to attend the CAA’s Committee for Women in the Arts panel session themed around “Feminist Pedagogy through Activist Arts Practices” (New York Hilton, Manhattan, 17 February 2017). During this 90-minute session…
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Curatorial traditions and experimental innovations at the Brooklyn Museum, New York
My recent visit to view the expansive art collections at Brooklyn Museum, located in the Prospect Park area of New York City, provided an interesting opportunity to peruse and critique a series of complex and engaging artistic and curatorial juxtapositions. On every level of this five storey building the vast collections of exhibits and their interpretation narratives were assembled to…
