Upcoming
"A SCHOOL FOR CREATING HUMANS?" BAUHAUS EDUCATION AND AESTHETICS REVISITED
Saturday 16th of November, 1 pm-3 pm
Performa Hub,47 Wooster Street, New York
The art school of the 21st Century has to be informed by historical foundations of art education as a contested field in which hegemonic discourses are challenged as well as perpetuated. It is timely that now in its Centennial year, we look at the Bauhaus, seldom critically discussed pedagogical foundations. This panel aims to reflect on and critically access the Bauhaus’ pedagogical approach and current art educational discourses.
What is the historical background for Gropius’s notion of the “human”? Whom did he envision liberated through creative forces, understanding material, and recognizing basic laws of visual design? What were his makings of art education on his time? How can we learn, align with and continue to push the boundaries of contemporary art education?
In the spirit of the Bauhaus, this panel consists of thinkers from various disciplines in order to create a multidisciplinary conversation and debate.
The conversation is led by Nana Adusei-Poku with Coco Fusco, Carmen Mörsch and Mabel O. Wilson.
Black Portraitures[s] V
October 18, 2019
Panel:
Re-reading the Archive: The Evolving Role of Curating Exhibitions
Location: Kimmel Center for University Life - 60 Washington Square South, RM 914, New York, New York 10012
4:30 pm—6:00 pm
I am very excited to share my paper called Re-Imagining the Sanctuary of Industry and Dreams- The Challenge of Curating loss and discuss with:
Alessandra Di Maio, University of Palermo, Professor
Angelica Dass, Independent Photographer, Educator
Claudi Carreras Guillén, Independent Curator
Leah Gipson, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Professor
Steed Vernyl Davidson, McCormick Theological Seminary
Moderator: Shelley Rice
Arte e Descolonização- Museo de arte Sao Paolo
October 15, 2019
More information will follow soon
Opening of Todd Gray's Eucledian Gris Gris and start of its program Longing on a large scale
September 14, 2019
Conversation with Todd Gray and Nana Adusei-Poku |
Introduction and Moderation by Phyllis J. Jackson
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
2 p.m. Conversation with Artist Todd Gray and Scholar and Curator Nana Adusei-Poku
Introduction and Moderation by Pomona College Professor of Art History Phyllis J. Jackson
3 p.m. Opening Reception
14. Bundeskongress Politische Bildung 7-9th of March 2019, Leipzig Germany
March 09, 2019
THEME: Was uns bewegt. Emotionen in Politik und Gesellschaft
I will speak as part of Section 12 on 9th of March:
Wie gestaltet sich "politische Kunst"? Ermöglichen ästhetische Formate besondere Potenziale politischer Partizipation? In welchem Verhältnis stehen politische Bildung und Kunst, politische und kulturelle Bildung? Können sie gemeinsam politische Bildungsprozesse fördern?
We will discuss teh following questions:
Wie gestaltet sich "politische Kunst"? Ermöglichen ästhetische Formate besondere Potenziale politischer Partizipation? Bietet Kunst durch sinnliche Wahrnehmung, nicht-sprachlichen Ausdruck, Leiblichkeit und Emotionalität "bessere" politische Bildungsmöglichkeiten? In welchem Verhältnis stehen politische Bildung und Kunst, politische und kulturelle Bildung? Können sie gemeinsam politische Bildungsprozesse fördern?
Discourse-American Realness: DAS N BABY UND IHRE PUPPE AFRIKA- AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE
January 04, 2020
Friday, January 4, 4:00pm
50 minutes
Gibney
The Theater
280 Broadway (Entrance at 53A Chambers Street)
Manhattan
FREE
Blackness is not monolithic.
There are many ways to be Black.
There are many Diasporas and many Black His/Her/Their – stories.
Many of these diasporas and stories intersect and intertwine.
During the last ten years African American artists have gained stronger representation in European cultural contexts, often whilst local Afro European histories and peoples remain overlooked and marginalized.
When exhibiting and/or performing abroad African American performers encounter these European cultural contexts, and are confronted with viewers who have limited knowledge of local racial discourses, African American history, or Black performance history.
This performative lecture engages with the ways in which Black identity is experienced, through an autobiographical collage, which situates itself outside of the middle passage narrative in order to open gateways of relations, which find seldom address in the US American dominant narrative of Blackness.
NY Art Book Fair 2018- THE CLASSROOM Conversation with Leslie Hewitt about her first monograph
September 22, 2019
MoMA PS1, Basement Theater, 3-4:30pm
Unitled (Structures) with Leslie Hewitt and Nana Adusei-Poku
Leslie Hewitt and Nana Adusei-Poku discuss the collaborative approach of Hewitt’s first monograph, Untitled (Structures), published by OSMOS Books. Hewitt describes the collaboration with cinematographer Bradford Young as a project that “addresses the topographic, corporeal, and psychological landscapes embedded in the unexpected traces of history in contemporary life.” The book, edited by Cay-Sophie Rabinowitz with essays by Nana Adusei-Poku and Lisa Lee and a conversation with curator Eva Respini surveys the history of Hewitt’s practice and production.
Lecture in BERLIN: Performances of Nothingness II – Tracing the Ephemeral Archive
July 13, 2018
I am back in Berlin soon!
Conveners: Elahe Haschemi Yekani (HU Berlin), Tavia Nyong’o (Yale) & Eva Boesenberg (HU Berlin)
Entangled Diasporas: Shadow Archives in Black, Queer, and Postcolonial Studies
Recently, interdisciplinary attention in the fields of postcolonial studies, Black studies, feminist studies, and queer studies has turned to the question of “entanglement.” Variously rendered in German as Verflechtung (as used in histoirecroisée / Globalgeschichte) and as Verschränkung (as used in quantum mechanics and feminist technoscience studies), entanglement holds both ontological and epistemological relevance. Entanglement promises to reshape archival studies and historiography, bringing to bear the resources of new materialist and ecocritical approaches, fabulation and new narrative approaches, such as surface and other reading strategies that challenge both conceptions of identity as well as linear temporalities and national canons. Entanglement is also meant to highlight the interactions and cross-connections between different diasporic communities.
By using the term shadow archives, we intend to point to a phenomenon that is neither reading with or against the grain, and that does not begin from the assumption that the archive is either “full” or “empty.” Beyond such dualisms, the shadow archive points towards fields of historical potentiality (or virtuality) against the idea of afterwardness / Nachträglichkeit that models such as counter histories or writing back imply. We want to engage with queer temporalities of utopias and spaces in the city that can be directed at both the past and the present, to engage with assumptions of coevality or the yet to come. We seek to name a research agenda that isn’t divided between archive and repertoire, presence and absence, or affective attachment and detachment, subversion or collusion but rather engage with the entangled, queer and messy ways we create meaning today by looking to the past.
BERLIN: PERFORMANCES OF NO-THINGNESS
May 26, 2018
Colonial Repercussions
Akademie der Künste Berlin
26&27 May
Curation Nana Adusei-Poku
The curatorial framing of this discursive platform represents an inquiry into Black diasporic cultural productions as a critique on hegemonic Western concepts of identity. With artistic positions on queer studies, embodiment, performativity and decolonization by Travis Alabanza, Ain Bailey, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Che Gossett, NIC Kay, Autumn Knight, Christina Sharpe and Sorryyoufeeluncomfortable.
ON BLACK PERFORMANCE: WHEN THERE IS NO OTHER ONTOLOGY THAN THE STAGE, STAGING, AND BEING STAGED
March 30, 2018
Masters Program in Curatorial Practice
School of Visual Arts
7pm
With Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Will Rawls, NIC Kay
Organized and moderated by Nana Adusei-Poku
To provoke a discussion about the relationship between the Black Body, the intimacy of the stage, and public space, let us begin with what William Pope.L said about there being “no other ontology than the stage, staging, and being staged.” How do contemporary performance artists and curators grapple with the question of how to exist, perform, and conceptualize their own non-being in relation to their hypervisibility on stage? How does the practice of care echo in their practice, and how do (or don’t) Afro-pessimist and Black Nihilism concepts figure in their works? How do artists and curators challenge the difficult relationship with the audience and interrogate the legacy of the Black Body as a spectacle in dissent?
BETWEEN SADNESS AND SANITY
November 30, 2017
Denniston Hill and the Dedalus Foundation presents a conversation between Autumn Knight, whose work is interested in Black interiority in relation to coerced public spectacle and Nana Adusei-Poku, a Ghanian- German scholar whose current work focuses on cultural shifts and afro-pessimist aesthetics in Black Cultures. The conversation is inspired by Knight’s new participatory performance Series called Sanity TV, which is a fictional talk show that investigates the flexible boundaries of identity and psyche. Knight and Adusei-Poku will speak on the evolution of Sanity TV, and the influence of Harlem. Questions of the historical construction of norms in relationship to colonialism and gender as well as the still precarious position of Black subjects and subjectivities will be addressed. This conversation will explore themes of normativity, racialization, and performance as a space to push the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and the ‘insane’, the self and the other, the pessimistic and the hopeful. Sanity TV is presented as four episodes over the course of the Studio Museum Harlem Artists in Residence exhibition We Go as They, September 14-January 7.
INTRA-DISCIPLINARY SEMINAR PUBLIC LECTURE at Cooper Union: "Post-Post-Black?"
October 17, 2017
How to make sense of a term that has stirred so much controversy in the early 2000s in the U.S. context sixteen years past its invention, a term that was used for a generation of black artists that seemed to distance themselves from previous generations, who utilized the term black in order to define their practices as a form of political resistance. Through recent activist work (i.e. Black Lives Matter) and media attention to persistent systemic racism as well as the rise of rightwing populism, “post-black” appears more than obsolete and is seldom used in the arts or in wider social discourse.This talk will trace the term post-black from its emergence, introduce accompanying debates around the term, and connect its difficult meaning with contemporary debates in the Afro-pessimist discourse as well as popular culture.
Documenta14- Lecture at the "Parliament of Bodies": Post-Post-Black!
December 23, 2019
MEME Credit: Clarifiedhateration
How to make sense of a term that has stirred so much controversy in the early 2000s in the U.S. context sixteen years past its invention, a term that was used for a generation of black artists that seemed to distance themselves from previous generations, who utilized the term black in order to define their practices as a form of political resistance. Through recent activist work (i.e. Black Lives Matter) and media attention to persistent systemic racism as well as the rise of rightwing populism, “post-black” appears more than obsolete and is seldom used in the arts or in wider social discourse. However, the generation of artists that drew more attention due to the first two exhibitions Freestyle and Frequency left a significant mark on contemporary visual culture and the arts. This talk will trace the term post-black from its emergence, introduce accompanying debates around the term, and connect its difficult meaning with contemporary debates in the Afro-pessimist discourse as well as popular culture.
FOAM Amsterdam: Black representation through photography
December 17, 2019
On 17 August at Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam, various experts will discuss Gordon Parks’ use of photography as a weapon against poverty, racism and social inequality.
N+ WORKSHOP at ICA London
August 12, 2017
Being present where
when you wish to (dis-)appear…
How to survive the work? Join Nana Adusei - Poku and NIC Kay in a day long exercise / workshop in building community around how to confront the ways in which we navigate and uphold oppressive systems which harm us. This transdisciplinary workshop consists of movement, close readings, discussion, and drawing.
Farewell Rotterdam
July 30, 2017
"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." Audre Lorde
I have created this video piece on my lunch break- working through being a Black person in the world, in History and it reminded me of the fact that there is always space to be creative and to break out of the confines that our surrounding sets out for us. It reminded me to be brave and to engage with my core.
I am grateful for the many lessons that I have learned during my time in Rotterdam and the people who have been part of this journey.
POSITIONS – STRATEGIES FOR ARTISTIC ACCOUNTABILITY
March 23, 2017
A symposium and exhibition in conjunction with ‘The Art of Looking: Description, Analysis, Interpretation, Judgment?’, a thematic project for the Master Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, led by Nana Adusei-Poku, Research Professor in Visual Culture at Rotterdam University
February 16, 2017
As part of WDKA makes a Difference, a project wich researches the processes of inclusion and exclusion in art education, workshops and a public event takes place at TENT.
On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear
February 28, 2017
How does blackness apprehend itself when it has been interpolated—the word is too gentle in this case—for centuries as the opposite, or absence, of reason? In “On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear,” Nana Adusei-Poku considers a contemporary manifestation of the same association, common in the artworld, of nothingness, universality, and whiteness.