• frame of In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2013), by The Otolith Group
    frame of In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2013), by The Otolith Group

  • from the photo series BLOOD, 2003, by Theo Eshetu

    from the photo series BLOOD, 2003, by Theo Eshetu

Uses of Memory

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posted on 02/02/2015
Caderno 10 brings together artists and researchers from Africa and diasporas who reflect upon archives as a subject matter to art, as well as its relation with the construction of memory

Edited by Spanish-Guinean Elvira Dyangani Ose, Caderno 10 compiles essays and artistic propositions by some of the foremost artists and researchers from African and diaspora countries, who have contributed with texts, interviews, photographs, video stills, illustrations and digitized documents. Their collaborations address the scenario of massive decolonization in Africa between the decades of 1950 and 1970, pondering on archives and history as the focus of art and on the latter’s connection with the building or retrieval of memory to reformulate historical representations.

Learn more about the collaborators of Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 10: Uses of Memory:


Editor:

Elvira Dyangani Ose is lecturer in visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, GIBCA 2015. She was Curator International Art, supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc at Tate Modern (2011–2014), where she was responsible for Across the Board (2012–2014) and co-curated Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (2013). Prior to Tate, she was curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (2004–2006) and at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (2006–2008). She has curated seminal exhibitions, among others, Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies (2010), Attempt to Exhaust an African Place (2007–2008), and Olvida Quien Soy/ Erase Me from Who I Am (2006). She was curator of Arte Invisible (2009–2010) and the Artistic Director of the third edition of the Rencontres Picha, Lubumbashi Biennial (2013). She is currently pursuing a PhD, and holds MAS in history of art and visual studies from Cornell University, New York, and in theory and history of architecture from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, and a BA in art history from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Collaborators:

Chimurenga is a project-based mutable object, an occasional print magazine, a workspace, and a platform for editorial and curatorial activities founded in 2002 by Ntone Edjabe. Ongoing Chimurenga projects include: the Chronic, a future-fwd, pan-African quarterly gazette; the Chimurenga Library, a pop-up institution, an occasional installation of research projects, an online archive of publishing initiatives; and The Pan-African Space Station, an Internet-based music platform.

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa is an artist and researcher. She studied literature at Cambridge University and fine arts at the Slade School of Fine Art, in Great Britain. She is currently the research coordinator of the Nagenda International Academy of Art & Design (Uganda) and a Fellow of Künstlerhaus Buchsenhausen (Austria), where she is working on the history of European utopian settlements in East Africa. She works in a range of media, including installation, video, photography, printmaking, and drawing. Recent exhibitions include: Giving Contours to Shadows (Savvy Contemporary/Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Germany) and KLA ART 012 (Kampala Contemporary Art Festival, Uganda).

Maryam Jafri is an artist working in video, performance, and photography. Informed by a research-based, interdisciplinary process, her artworks are often marked by a visual language poised between film and theater, and a series of narrative experiments oscillating between script and document, fragment and whole. She holds a BA in English & American Literature from Brown University, a MA from NYU/Tisch School of The Arts, and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun. The Group’s work explores the legacies and potentials of liberation struggles, tricontinentalism, speculative futures, and science fiction. Recent solo exhibitions include Medium Earth, REDCAT, Los Angeles (2013) and In The Year of the Quiet Sun, Bergen Kunsthall (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Travelling Communique, Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade (2014) and The Anthropocene Report, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2014). In 2010, The Otolith Group was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Premesh Lalu is professor of history and director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. He is the author of The Deaths of Hintsa: Post-Apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (Cape Town: hsrc Press, 2009), for which he received a longlist mention from the Alan Paton-Sunday Times Book Prize, and the UWC Vice-Chancellor’s award for best monograph. Premesh Lalu is coeditor of Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and Unmaking Apartheid’s Legacy (Bellville, Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, 2012). He has contributed significantly to current debates on the humanities through various local and international newspaper opinion pieces.

Theo Eshetu has worked in media art since 1982, challenging conventional genres and moving across formats including experimental video, installation art, documentary, and photography. Interested in the expressive potentials of video and its distinctiveness from other art forms, Eshetu’s work reveals a clear fascination for the interrelation of world cultures and for the metaphysical nature of the electronic image. He has exhibited at the Tate (London), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the International Center for Photography (New York), and the Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), among others. His works were shown at numerous video and film festivals and at the Venice Biennale.

Tracy Murinik is an arts writer, curator, editor, and researcher. She has written and published extensively on contemporary art from South Africa and the continent. She was a contributing author/curator for the recent Phaidon publication on contemporary avant-gardism, Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes, edited by Kari Rittenbach in 2013; she also researched, wrote, and coproduced a series of thirteen award-winning documentary films on South African art and landscape, A Country Imagined (SABC & Curious Pictures, 2010). Murinik is a research associate with the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) Research Centre, in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg.

Yaiza Hernández Velázquez is a lecturer in the MRES Art at Central Saint Martins (London) where she teaches exhibition studies, and philosophy and theory of art. Until 2012, she was Head of Public Programmes at MACBA (Barcelona). Before that she worked, among other things, as director of CENDEAC (Murcia) and curator at CAAM(Las Palmas de Gran Canaria). She has recently published the anthology Inter/Multi/Cross/Trans. The Uncertain Territory of Art Theory in the Age of Academic Capitalism (2011) and is currently preparing the sole-authored book General Theory, which is scheduled to be published by Consonni in 2015.