Reading Group – Performing Stillness

Description

Join guest curator Liz Ikiriko and Nya Lewis Williams to discuss essay by Tina Campt called "Performing Stillness."

Additional Information

The essay that will be discussed is "Performing Stillness" by Tina Campt. You will receive a copy of the essay by email. If you want to receive the essay early or register without an RPL card, please email wpeart@reginalibrary.ca

Join the discussion through Zoom here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81515039598 
Closed captions available

About the essay Performing Stillness by Tina Campt:

What changes in our understanding of the experience of Black communities in diaspora when we move beyond the binaries of stillness and motion to engage Black life through the lens of stasis? This essay explores a collection of vernacular photos of a Black German family in the Third Reich using the concept of stasis to unpack the social, historical, political, and visual tensions that structure these images’ depiction of their Black German subjects. Viewing these images as complex depictions of stasis (defined not as the cessation of movement but as motion held in suspension and a balancing of multiple forces) offers a generative framework for theorizing the quotidian practices of refusal that constitute Black fugitivity.

Liz Ikiriko is a Tkaronto/Toronto-based, prairie-born, Nigerian Canadian artist and curator. Her work as an educator, maker and mother inform her practice which is focused on African and diasporic narratives. She is committed to the creation of embodied experiences that utilize accessible platforms to share moments of vulnerability and care for all of us on the margins. She holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University (2019). Her work has been exhibited nationally and her writing has appeared in Public Journal, MICE Magazine, C Magazine and Akimbo. Presently she is curating, Is Love A Synonym for Abolition? (2021), on view at Gallery 44 during the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. She teaches photography at X University and is Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University.

Nya Lewis’ practice is a culmination of centuries of African resistance, love, questions, actions, study, embrace and exposure in the face of failed neo-colonial attempts at erasure. Nanyamka’s expression is powered by the perpetual engine of truth-explored, uncompromised. It interrupts, it educates, it asks, it unites, it celebrates a Canada with all voices present, with all voices heard, with actions taken and commitment to justice declared. Her practice is a continuation of a long lineage of work undertaken by Black artists, curators, writers, activists and thinkers who blaze(d) a trail of critical discourse surrounding the Black Canadian Experience. Lewis’ creative practice reflects upon the diversity of Black diasporic experiences and its many forms of expression. She works across the disciplines of art making, curating and writing. Her work is multivalent in form and expression but is always driven by the reimagining and reclaiming of community. Lewis is a MFA candidate at OCAD University, an Independent curator and the founder and director of BlackArt Gastown.

About author Tina Campt:

Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media. Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. One of the founding researchers in Black European Studies, her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in Black communities in Europe, focusing on the role of vernacular photography in processes of historical interpretation. Her books include: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), and Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017). She has held faculty positions at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University, and Barnard College. Campt serves as a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. At the Cogut Institute, she leads the Black Visualities Initiative.

This program is conducted through Zoom. Please ensure that you have Zoom installed on your device or computer. If you don’t have a library card, please visit: https://www.reginalibrary.ca/register 

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12 spots available

Registration Closed