Tuesday, 12 April 2022
6.30 pm SAST, 5.30 pm GMT
The series is free and will take place via Zoom. No registration is required.
Click here to participate
With speakers Kimberly Drew (Associate Director at Pace gallery), Nomusa Makhubu (Associate Professor, University of Cape Town ) and Felwine Sarr (Philosopher, Economist & Professor at Duke University).
In the second session of Zeitz MOCAA’s 14-part webinar series hosted in collaboration with the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), we consider how Black artists on the African continent and within its diaspora create work that invites the dialogical between the ‘Us’ and the ‘We’.
The title of the session – Defining the ‘We’ & the ‘Us’ – denotes a reflexive imperative, both on the part of the makers of images that reflect the plurality of Black life and on those whose experiences are represented in the kaleidoscopic artistic effigies of Black enunciation, agency and self-determination. This title thus posits the question of how this discursive series and upcoming exhibition cues a generative interrogation of this shift in self-perception and self-writing.
Conceived by Zeitz MOCAA in collaboration with the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), the When We See Us webinar series precedes a major exhibition of the same name, opening in November 2022. The exhibition, along with its accompanying programming, of which the webinar series is part, will attempt to unveil the deeper historic contexts and networks of a complex and underrepresented genealogy that stems from African and Black modernities and spans several generations from the early 20th century to the present.
Zeitz MOCAA’s curatorial and exhibition programming is generously supported by GUCCI.
Speakers include:
Felwine Sarr, Philosopher, economist and academic
Felwine Sarr is a Sengalese philosopher, economist and academic. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Afrotopia (University of Minnesota Press 2019, tr. by Drew S Burk) and a professor at Duke University. He is well-known for his ground-breaking report ‘The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics’, which argues for the return of artefacts stolen from Africa and Asia by European powers.
Image: Antoine Tempa
Kimberly Drew, Associate Director, Pace Gallery
Kimberly Drew is the Associate Director at Pace Gallery. She has previously worked as a social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, United States, reinvigorating and diversifying the institution’s digital presence. She has since held positions on the communications teams of the Studio Museum, the Met and the gallery Lehmann Maupin. A leading voice in contemporary art, Drew is the author of the international bestseller This Is What I Know About Art and the anthology Black Futures, which she co-edited with Jenna Wortham.
Image: Inez & Vinoodh
Nomusa Makhubu, Associate Professor in Art History and Visual Culture, University of Cape Town
Nomusa Makhubu is an associate professor in Art History and deputy dean of transformation in Humanities at the University of Cape Town. She received the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) African Humanities Program fellowship award and was an African Studies Association (ASA) Presidential fellow in 2016. In 2017, she was also a UCT-Harvard Mandela fellow at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, Harvard University. Recognising the need for mentorship and collaborative practice in socially responsive arts, she founded Creative Knowledge Resources (CKR). She co-co-curated with Nkule Mabaso the international exhibition, Fantastic, in 2015 and The stronger we become in 2019 at the 58th Venice Biennale in Italy.
