Black Art as a Site of Study
with contributions from: Tobi Onabolu, Raimi Gbadamosi, Emmanuel Ndefo, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros and Soñ Gweha
A Daylong program on Black art, Black study, Black life. Black Art as a Site of Study is a one-day gathering that resonates with the self-determined artistic, pedagogical and knowledge practices of the Black Diaspora across the world. This gathering brings together Black artists, educators, thinkers and cultural workers to facilitate artistic dialogue, foster collective (un)learning and share methodologies. In what ways does Black Life animate Black art, and how do Black artistic movements, their methodologies, practices shape our present and inspire artistic practices.
Black Art as a site of study is grounded in Black life, art and thought. We aim to convene around provocations, prompts, sonic memories and inquiries that stretch across disciplines and geographies. Together we zoom into the friction and possibilities at the intersections of Black arts, Black pedagogies and Black futures.
Together with contributions from: Tobi Onabolu, Raimi Gbadamosi, Emmanuel Ndefo, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros and Soñ Gweha, we zoom into the friction and possibilities at the intersections of Black arts, Black pedagogies and Black futures.
Raimi Olakunle Gbadamosi (1965) is a British-Nigerian conceptual artist, writer, and curator whose practice examines intersections of race, language, power, and identity through multimedia forms including installations, music, websites, writing, and audience engagement.
Emmanuel Ndefo is a multimedia artist, researcher and choreographer who uses the body as both medium and interface to explore how movement can engage with urgent contemporary dialogues. Working with the metaphor of “hacking,” he imagines the body as a living network and experience as data, vulnerable to glitches yet also open to free creation, presence, and discovery.
Tobi Onabolu is an interdisciplinary artist who approaches art as a living process beyond the production of isolated objects. He describes his work as moving across four interconnected states: feeling, dreaming, sensing, and living. These are expressed through performance and writing, photography and moving image, installation and objects, and the development of long-term cultural platforms, respectively. Across these modes, Onabolu draws from African cosmologies, psychology, and embodied knowledge to examine the relationship between interior experience and collective structures.
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is a Cuban-born scholar of contemporary Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies. She received her Ph.D. in Art and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2002 and taught at the University of Connecticut, before joining Penn in 2019.
Soñ Gweha is an artist, researcher, community organizer born in 1989, who lives and works between the outskirts of Paris in France and Vienna in Austria. Through a transdisciplinary practice, Soñ Gweha works with music, poetry, video, performance, installation, sculpture to deconstruct the mechanisms of survival, mindfulness and healing.
🔥Date: Tuesday, June 30th
🔥Time: 10:00 - 17:00
🔥Location: Westerdoksdijk 597,
🔥Free, please RSVP here.