Afterall Art School

Events

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza on Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

In conversation with Afterall editor Elisa Adami and CSM Art Programme Director Alex Schady, artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza talked about her work in response to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential text Can the Subaltern Speak? for the Two Works series.

La Sape and Other Local Imaginaries in Kinshasa

(en français) Conversation between Prisca Tankwey, Cedrick Nzolo, Sinzo Aanza, Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse, Judith Clark, Charlotte Delacour, Adeena Mey, and Mick Finch during Afterall’s La Sape and Other Local Imaginaries symposium held in SOAS, University of London.

Infectious Image Viral Content in the DRC

This talk by Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse, assistant professor at the Catholic University of Congo, will explore how and why digital content is shared and moved into circulation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ribio’s presentation discusses how visual genres such as print cartoons and popular painting now overlap with digital viral videos and memes and highlights the potential for postcolonial political critique offered by online content.

On the Improbable Memorial and Other Projects

(en français) Photographer and writer Sinzo Aanza walks us through his Improbable Memorial and explores Congolese people as the direct and indirect victims of the worldwide spread of mobile phones, which are made with many materials mined in Congo and whose ubiquitous and indispensable character extends the colonial exploitation of resources and people into the present time.

The mvuata-mable

Designer Cedrick Nzolo takes us through the soul of the Sape. Between art of living, seduction and technique of being. The mvuata-mable is drawn from the CDA (Congo Design Arts) Project which brings together three areas of research and expressiveness: textile and furniture design, fashion and architecture.

Boundaries Between the Sape and Performance Art

Artist and educator Prisca Tankwey presents on the Sape in relation to notions of identity, profile and belonging to classical categories of artistic practices. Too close to performance art, in plastic and conceptual terms, the discipline of the Sape begs a definition or the establishment of new boundaries.

[Description: Photo of Rachael Minott and Rosana Paulino]
Decolonial Artmaking

A conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonial artmaking in the 2020s, with artists Rachael Minott and Rosana Paulino. The event will be chaired by writer, researcher and curator Elisa Adami.

[Description: Photo of Osmundo Pinho and Rahul Rao]
Decolonising the University

A conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonising universities in the 2020s, with Osmundo Pinho, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at Recôncavo da Bahia Federal University, Brazil, and Rahul Rao, Senior Lecturer in Politics at SOAS, University of London. The coversation and Q&A will be chaired by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez, Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Decolonising Publishing

A conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonising museums in the 2020s, with Diego del Valle Ríos, organiser, writer and editor at Terremoto magazine, and curator, architect and researcher Margrarida Nzuzi Waco of The Funambulist magazine, chaired by Afterall Managing Editor Amber Husain.

[Description: Danielle Brathewaite-Shirley (left), and Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso (right).]
Gender and Decolonisation

Join us for a conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonisation in the 2020s with a focus on qestions of gender, with artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and philosopher Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, chaired by researcher Ana González Rueda.

[Description: Victoria Noorthoorn (on the left), and Elvira Espejo Ayca (on the right).]
Decolonising the Museum

A conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonising museums in the 2020s, with Victoria Noorthoorn, Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, and Bolivian artist, writer and musician Elvira Espejo Ayca, chaired by Amanda Carneiro, Curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.

on Chardin

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University, in conversation with artist and Afterall Co-Founding Director Mark Lewis on the ethics of painting and themes of subjectivity in the pedagogical process, with reference to Jean-Siméon Chardin’s captivating 1737 painting, The Young Schoolmistress.

on Adelita Husni-Bey

Researcher and curator Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga in conversation with Afterall Managing Editor Adeena Mey on the school as a site of transgression, emotion and radical imagination in Adelita Husni-Bey’s experimental project Postcards From the Desert Island (2010–11).

 

on Mike Kelley

Artist, critic and Barnard College Professor John Miller discusses the art school in neoliberal crisis and the role of art and the artist in the present, in light of Mike Kelley’s 1995 work of institutional critique, Educational Complex. In conversation Alex Schady, artist and Programme Director for Art at Central Saint Martins.

[Description: Photo of Dr. Yuriko Jackall.]
on Adélaide Labille-Guiard

Yuriko Jackall, Curator of French Paintings at the Wallace Collection, in conversation with artist and CSM Professor of Research Mick Finch on feminism and friendship in Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self Portrait With Two Pupils (1785).

[Description: Photo of Chris Fite-Wassilak.]
on Johanna Billing

Writer and critic Chris Fite-Wassilak in conversation with artist, filmmaker and CSM professor Graham Ellard on identity and the production of space in Johanna Billing’s 2019 video and performance piece In Purple.

[Description: Elizabeth Catlett (left), and Sylwia Serafinowicz (right).]
on Elizabeth Catlett

A conversation and Q&A with writer and curator Sylwia Serafinowicz on Elizabeth Catlett‘s 1978 work Students Aspire, made for the campus of Howard University. Serafinowicz will discuss the work and her short essay on its themes co-facilitators Alison Green, art historian, critic, curator and CSM Senior Lecturer, and creative and curator Vanessa Spiridellis, whose research covers Pan-African religions, pirate history and intersectional feminist theory.

Essays

Decolonial Artmaking in the 2020s

Artist, curator, and researcher Rachael Minott thinks through decolonial views on artmaking, gathering the thoughts of Audre Lorde and her own personal experiences.

Notes on Reading Artworks by Black Artists in the Brazilian Context

Arist and educator Rosana Paulino writes about the ways in which Black artists are written about and studied in Brazil, and how these modalities can be challenged.

[Description: Black and white photograph of people looking out of a window]
Decolonisation’s Conservative Enemies and Liberal Friends

In this essay, Senior Lecturer in Politics at SOAS Rahul Rao reflects on the UK’s Conservative response to Black History Month.

[Description: Valeska Soares, Duplaface (Branco de titânio), 2017. Oil and cutout on existing oil portrait, 71 x 56cm. Courtesy MASP]
Anti-Blackness and Representation: Decolonising the Library at the Peripheral University

Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at Recôncavo da Bahia Federal University Osmundo Pinho reflects on the Brazilian writers Monteiro Lobato and Carolina Maria de Jesus, thinking through representation and Blackness.

Notes on Publishing: Imagination and limitation in the 2020s

Curator, architect, and researcher Margarida Waco writes about the publishing industry in 2020, its potentials, and pitfalls.

Fire to the Factories of Whiteness!

In this text, cultural organiser and writer Diego del Valle Rios writes about Mexico City’s relationship with decoloniality as the ‘Cultural Capital of America,’ its museum’s collections, and ways to dismantle the city’s capitalist hydra.

To Intervene in the Museum or to Dynamite it? Some reflections on art and decoloniality

Philosopher Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso writes about broadening our understandings on art as intertwined with daily life and liberation.

[Description: Six small wooden bowls lined up on a right diagonal angle leading from foreground to the white background, each with spun fabric on them. Near the base of the rods are threaded wooden bearings to hold the fabric in place.]
‘Universal Education’ in Art and its Painful Divisions

Artist, writer, and musician Elvira Espejo Ayca takes readers through the Andean language, unpacking art’s necessary ties to praxis and the act of doing.

Three Attempts to Decolonise the South

In this essay, Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires Victoria Noorthoorn details three attempts by the museum to decolonise during a moment of global crisis.