SEMINAR + Workshop BAT Bridging Art + Text
BAT Groups
BLACK IDENTITY
ANNEMARI Clausen, BAT Coordinator/Previous Festival Manager of My World Images in 2010, Denmark
Annemari Brogaard Clausen is the former festival manager of My World IMAGES - the largest contemporary arts festival in Denmark. The festival included over 220 artists from more than 40 countries presenting new artistic collaborations in film, visual art, literature, performing art, and music in 14 Danish cities. Miss Clausen has worked with cross-cultural events in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, South America and Europe developing, programming, producing and promoting film festivals, performances, concerts, exhibitions, seminars and conferences.
CHRISTOPHER Cozier, Curator/Co-Director of Alice’s Yard, Trinidad
Christopher Cozier is an artist, writer, and curator living and working in Trinidad. He is a member of the editorial collective of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and also edits the on-line “sxspace” of the journal, which looks at visual production. His artwork has been exhibited at the 7th Havana Biennial, The Brooklyn Museum, the Stenersen Museum (Oslo), the Chicago Cultural Centre, the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe, the Biennial of Cuenca, Real Art Ways (Hartford) and TATE Liverpool. He was co-curator of Paramaribo Span as well as co-editor of its blog and book, which opened in January 2010. He was the co-curator of Wrestling with the Image (2011) at the Museum of the Americas (Washington DC). With architect Sean Leonard, writer and editor Nicholas Laughlin, and musician Sheldon Holder, Cozier is co-director of Alice Yard, at once a physical space, a collaborative network, and an ongoing conversation about contemporary art and creativity in the Caribbean. Since 2006, Alice Yard has hosted numerous artists’ projects, performances, musical events, readings, discussions, and film screenings. Creative projects within Alice Yard’s physical and virtual neighbourhood include the e-magazine Draconian Switch, covering contemporary art and design in Trinidad; and the Caribbean Review of Books.
christophercozier.blogspot.com/
Prof. AMARASWAR Galla, Ph.D, Executive Director of the International Institute for the Inclusive Museum, Copenhagen/Hyderabad/Chicago & Professor of World Heritage & Sustainable Development, University of Split, Croatia INDIA/AUSTRALIA/FRANCE
Amareswar Galla is a Guest Curator of International A champion of cultural democracy, indigenous rights and UN Millennium Development Goals, Amar, is an alumnus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the Producer of the publication on World Heritage and Local Communities, a flagship project of the 40th Anniversary of the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention in 2012 and Guest Curator of International Projects, Vietnam National Department of Cultural Heritage. Amar was Professor of Museum Studies, University of Queensland, Brisbane and Professor & Director of Sustainable Heritage Development Programs, Australian National University, Canberra. During 1994 - 99 he was the International Technical Adviser for the transformation of Arts Councils, National Museums and the National Parks Board (now SAN Parks) in post-apartheid South Africa. He was an expert adviser to the UN World Commission for Culture and Development. He worked on the implementation of Museums and Cultural Diversity Promotion at the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, Netherlands. His work, listed as best practice in the 2009 World Culture Report by UNESCO, includes the establishment of World Heritage Areas as culture in poverty alleviation projects - Ha Long Bay and Hoi An, Vietnam and Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, India. He has been honoured internationally on several occasions including Outstanding Conservationist of the Year Award by the Vietnamese government in 2002 and the European Best in Heritage Award in 2008. Amar spends time building community grounded museums in heritage tourism with his graduate students in low economic indicator countries. His enduring commitment to inclusive heritage development informs his community engagement, professional achievements and keynote addresses worldwide.
YOYO Gonthier, Visual Artist, NIGER/RÉUNION/FRANCE
Commemorative placards celebrating French colonial suppression, plastic dolls of black colonial soldiers made to join the lives of Barbie and Ken, carnival masks of colonizer and colonized and live size dolls of the white colonial man in large display windows – these are some of the artifacts displayed at Oui mon commandant (Yes Sir) an ongoing project by Yo-Yo Gonthier. Through photography and installations the french artist Yo-Yo Gonthier, born in Niger in 1974, has captured and exhibited artifacts and monuments of colonialism, which are still present today in public space in both France and Mali. Yo-Yo Gonthier’s work elaborates how the colonial past still figures in space and relationships between the former colonizers and the former colonies and how current African artists relate to their colonial past and how they face current global trends. He participated in the Biennial of African Photography in Bamako, Mali, in 2005 and 2009. In 2010, he is invited too coordinate a project mixing photography, sound and music, for the first edition of the Addis Foto Fest, in Ethiopia. He is currently in residence with the City of Saint-Denis, in Seine-Saint-Denis, France and also participates to La Triennale Intense proximity at Bétonsalon, Paris, France.
GILLION Grantsaan,Visual Artist/Curator, SURINAME/NETHERLANDS/DENMARK
Gillion Grantsaan has created his own subgenre of black art called Ogri-art - which possesses a migratory cultural flexibility and tolerance that is rooted in the cultural identity of the non-Western immigrant artist.
Gillion Grantsaan states “Isn’t there anyone out there genuinely hot for the real black thing? And am I, a black visual artist, capable of generating that drive that gave birth to Calypso, Funk, Hip-Hop, Bleus, Mambo and of translating this drive into visual art? Black Art. Black art is a product of black consciousness. Black art is elitism and there to be judged on its quality. Black in Black art means to be political. Black art is an innovative synthesis of two or more Welanschauungen. Black art is not the exclusive domain of people of African origin. As A fact Black art has nothing to Do with skin Pigment of the artist. But with the dreams that keep following me: Dream A, B, and C. Dream A is for producing images for my political ideals and black socio-cultural information. Dream B stands for shocking the world with innovative images. Dream C wants to inscribe my fellow immigrants in the course of European history - the shifting of identities and the power structures that play into them.”
www.ogrigilwaka.wordpress.com/ (in Dutch)
NANCY Hoffman, Previous Director of Instituto Buena Bista, Curaçao Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands
Until 2011 Nancy Hoffman was director of Instituto Buena Bista – Curaçao Center for Contemporary Art, a platform for the development of contemporary art in Curaçao. Nancy Hoffman also teaches at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and is currently working on her dissertation at Leiden University. She ihas curated the exhibition entitled ‘Who More Sci-Fi Than Us, contemporary art from the Caribbean’ at the Kunsthal KadE in Holland.
www.kunsthalkade.nl/tentoonstelling.php?item=1962
SASHA Huber, Visual Artist, Haiti/Switzerland/Finland
In her work Sasha Huber has challenged the ongoing celebration of Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), who was an influential racist and pioneering thinker of apartheid. She wanted that the Swiss mountain Agassizhorn should be renamed the “Rentyhorn” in honour of the Congolese-born slave Renty, whose photograph Agassiz used to prove the inferiority of the black race. Sasha is a member of the Transatlantic Committee “De-mounting Louis Agassiz”. This reinvestigation forms a link in Sasha Huber’s work, which also evolves around current situations such as the earthquake in Haiti – and the emotions of being distant from it in and living a contemporary Nordic context.
Sasha edited Rentyhorn the book in 2010, and was co-editor of (T)races of Louis Agassiz: Photography, Body and Science, Yesterday and Today on the occasion of the 29th São Paulo Biennial in 2010. Her first solo exhibition abroad was Transatlantic Passages: Agassiz, Haiti and Africa in the works of Sasha Huber at the Botkyrka Konsthall in 2010. In 2011 Huber participated to the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in Port au Prince with her husband Petri Saarikko. Together they run the art space Kallio Kunsthalle in Helsinki, Finland since 2011.
EBONY G. Patterson, Visual Artist, Jamaica/U.S.
In Ebony G Patterson's work you feel the shifting of identities, as she uses the feminine to measure the masculine in popular black culture. Patterson uses so called 'gangsta' and dancehall culture as a platform for her discourse. She shifts the symbols of the feminine and masculine. Ebony G. Patterson was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1981. She has shown her artwork in numerous solo and private exhibitions, such as the National Biennial (2010 and 2012), National Gallery of Jamaica, Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art (2007), Brooklyn Museum, Gangstas, Disciplez + the Boyz (2009), Cag[e] Gallery, Edna Manley College, and Rockstone and Bootheel (2009), Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut, Black Gossamer, Glass Curtain Gallery ,Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois (2011), 9 of 219, Alice Yard, Trinidad (2011), Out and Bad, National Gallery of Bermuda, Hamilton, Bermuda (2012), Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, Studio Museum, Harlem, NY (2012).
www.uky.edu/FineArts/Art/patterson.php
www.seelinegallery.com/patterson.html
KIRSE Junge-Stevnsborg, Artistic Director of Fri Udstillingsbygning, Denmark
Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg (b. 1974) works as Artistic Director at Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art and holds a master’s in Aesthetics and Culture (Cand. Mag. i Æstetik og Kultur). From 2006 – 2009 she worked as director at Gävle Konstcentrum in Sweden. Previously, Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg worked at Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsingborg, the Center for Danish Visual Arts, the Gallery Nicolai Wallner and Tate Gallery in London.
JEANNETTE Ehlers, Visual Artist, Trinidad/Denmark
Visual artist Jeannette Ehlers has worked with Danish colonialism in pieces such as the ATLANTIC (2009), which brings focus on a dark chapter in Danish history: its intensive participation in the slave trade and colonialism. Through digitally manipulated photographs and video installations, she closely examines the Danish triangular trade across the Atlantic between Denmark, the Caribbean and the Gold Coast. ATLANTIC offers no answers, but is a poetic presentation using photography, both documentary and manipulative possibilities to create reflections on the Danish slave trade. The piece Black Magic at the White House shows a shadow of a woman practicing a voodoo ritual in Marienborg, the place where the Danish prime minister resides, which was built on money gained from the slave trade. In her latest piece BUSTIN' MY KNOTS she examines how the slave trade still affects the African American culture. She has participated in Enter 2011, OPEN STUDIO, ISCP, New York, LOOP, Art fair, Barcelona, Spain, CPH:DOX, and she is the recipient of the three year working grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.
http://www.jeannetteehlers.dk/
INDEPENDENT POLITICS
RAMZIE Abrahams, Freedom Park, SOUTH AFRICA
Ramzie Abrahams is Head of Department of Heritage and Knowledge at Freedom Park in South Africa. Freedom Park is a Presidential Legacy Project initiated by the democratic government after 1994 to transform the heritage landscape of South Africa. The main focus of Freedom Park is to use heritage resources as a means to engage in processes of reconciliation, nation building and engender social cohesion. He is also serving on a Reference Group established by the Minister of Arts and Culture to advise on the conceptualisation and construction of the Matola Raid Memorial, a joint project between South Africa and Mozambique.
www.freedompark.co.za/cms/index.php
SØREN Assenholt, Visual Artist, DENMARK
Søren Assenholt’s contact with his work and communication with the world is formed through the transformation of wood. Using the language processed through the handicraft, he uses this language as a means of cognitive form of communication and meaning. This communication becomes a strong reason in seeing that there are other possible forms of discourse and building of relations.
He has investigated some of the history of postcolonial discourse through travel, writing, and small innovative happenings- such asthe locking up the film by Peter Bate, White King, Red Rubber, Black Death, which was banned in Belgium, into the lockers of The Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren outside Brussels. This film discusses the brutal colonisation of central Africa by Leopold, and so this museum was one of the many buildings founded by King Leopold II on this wealth, and so it seems only relevant that Assenholt’s happening should activate the memory of this history there.
In many works such as Transport Exchange Passages, Locked-out from the Inside, La philosophie de Tshamala, Counter-inflationary embroidery and Colonized Power are investigations into the past history through the materiality, objects of historical gaze, and practice of Colonisation in DR Congo. Assenholt transforms our gaze through always finding another passage or entrance into a commentary on these reflections in a new form. He uses collaborative practice as an important process of learning in his work, as it reveals other possibilities and questions in this communication. Assenholt is a recent graduate of The Danish Royal Academy of Arts, and has participated in a number of exhibitions Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense + The National Museum, Copenhagen, Piccadilly Exhibition Company, Aros Art Museum in Aarhus, the Danish Children’s Museum at the National Museum of Art, and Karen Blixen Museum.
NOUFEL Bouzeboudja, ICORN Author and Journalist/ Writer, ALGERIA/DENMARK
Noufel Bouzeboudja is an Amazigh writer, performer, and journalist from Algeria. He has been an English teacher and among his major literary projects has been as manager of Shakespeare plays, an acclaimed novelist, and a contributor to the US-based radio station, Numydia. Noufel writes in many different languages, including Arabic, Kabyle, English, and French. Noufel's last book, published in 2011 in France entitled Du Haut de nos Potences ('From Above Our Gallows'), explores themes including the revolutions in North Africa, freedom of expression and conscience, dictatorship, religious extremism and religious manipulation. He now collaborates with ICORN, PEN Dansk, IMS, and some universities and organisations in Europe.
www.noufelbouzeboudja.blogspot.com/p/in-danish.html
PATRICIA Kaersenhout, Visual Artist, Netherlands
Patricia Kaersenhout (NL 1966) studied fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. The Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and the CBK Zuidoost commissioned her in 2003 to develop a work of art in connection with 140 years abolition in the Netherlands and Suriname. In 2009 she participated in Wakaman, an exchange project between artists from Surinamese origin living in Suriname and Western Europe, which resulted in a publication and an exhibition in Ford Zeelandia, Paramaribo. Her first solo publication; Invisible Men containing 42 works on paper inspired by Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible man, was released in June 2009. Since then her work has been presented in shows at the biennials of Venice, Beijing and Australia. In 2010 she worked on a short film about the Dutch national anthem in a residency of the Netherlands foundation for visual arts, design and architecture. Recently she participated in Private Confessions, a group show in the Cello Factory in London. She was invited by TENT in Rotterdam to organize a debate together with artist Charll Landvreugd titled: Am I Black enough for you? in connection with the exhibition Paramaribo Perspectives. Together with several scientists like Paul Gilroy, Rosi Braidiotti, Catherine Hall, Alex van Stipriaan and Esther Captain, she participates in a scientific advisory board of the Centre for Humanities in Utrecht.
Currently she had shows in Amsterdam, Italy and Spain. She recently participated in the show, Wrestling with the image/Caribbean interventions, curated by Chris Cozier in Washingthon DC. In December 2011 she had a solo exhibition “What you don’t see is what you won’t get” in C&H artspace in Amsterdam. Press release: Patricia Kaersenhout delivers a new series of her most recent work, that represents a new transition phase in the her career as an artist. In this new work, loaded with a noir drama, Patricia Kaersenhout emphasizes sexual attitudes and historical neglect by black and white oppressors. Inspired by Bell Hooks’ book, Ain't I a woman she investigates the historical (non)position of black females. Since black women are mostly ignored in white written history she plays with the fact that being invisible gives one the freedom to question a so called truth and juice it up with fiction. This is directly related to her own oral history tradition where there is never a clear line between facts and fiction. With the title of the show the artists challenges the viewer to look with close attention in order not to miss anything. While watching the viewer looks at the subject that has been historically ignored and invisible, the black female. To understand the work the viewer has to watch with attention otherwise the essence won’t reveal itself.
Her work is represented by C&H artspace, Amsterdam
YVETTE Brackman/Visual Artist, Denmark/Russia/Denmark
Yvette Brackman is an American artist and writer living in Denmark. Her work often draws upon the history of the Soviet Union from which her family immigrated in 1959. Brackman’s art evokes Russian Constructivism, a revolutionary art movement that originated around 1919 and saw art as a practice directed towards social purposes. Brackman’s artistic output includes creating platforms for distribution and exchange with a performative character. In these works she engages audiences and communities in exploring issues of common responsibility and social relations. Her artwork draws upon various mediums of expression in which she uses a combination of crafted elements and time-based media to create narratives that unfold in space. Ms. Brackman will be participating in exhibitions in Approaching Journey, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, England, the Exception and the Rule, Svendborg Kunstforening, Svendborg, and Extreme Craft, Freies Museum, Berlin, Germany during the coming year.
MARIA Bregnbak, Art Historian/Curator, FAIR Residency Coordinator, The Factory of Art & Design, DENMARK/FRANCE
Maria Gry Bregnbak is a curator based in Copenhagen. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Copenhagen and currently works with international residencies at the Factory of Art and Design (FFKD) – a studio community as well as a site for art production and exhibition. She was a co-editor of the art journal Øjeblikket as well as a participant in numerous initiatives on policy matters. From 2006–10 she worked for a gallery in Paris where she was based at the time. She is currently involved in several local as well as international initiatives on collaboration and exchange within the art world.
Forthcoming projects include the 2012 Alt_Cph – the alternative art fair for non-profit artist run spaces at FFKD, where she’ll be part of a large and non-hierarchical curatorial team.
GRETHE Hald, Curator, Norway 
Grethe Hald is an artist and curator who has worked freelance as an art critic for 5 local newspapers and writer in several art magazines for 28 years. She has produced programs/ newspapers for a gallery; interviews with artists, photography, layout and design. As a writer she has written several catalogue texts for different artists. An newly started project is a book on ”The drawings of Kjell Torriset”. For 9 years Grethe Hald was part of the project group curating a international sculpture park in Vestfold, Norway, called ”Sti for øyet” (A path for the eye). She is now exhibition coordinator for Sørlandsutstillingen at Telemark Kunstnersenter and is engaged as consultant for KORO - Public Art Norway.
Political and postcolonial aspects of international artistic practice are of great concern for Grethe Hald as curator. She curated ”Antagelser/Assumptions”, an international exhibition at Gallery F 15 in 2010, with 4 artists from Iran, Kurdistan, Columbia and Norway, consisting of works from artists being challenged to reveal stereotypes and preconceived notions. Grethe Hald is now preparing ”AMNESIA - Nordic contemporary” for Haugar Art Museum in 2013. She will also be co-curating an exhibition on Polish art at Haugar in 2014.
http://www.momentum.no/assumptions.4913180-181205.html
http://www.i-curate.net/index-en.php?userid=777777777
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/grethe-hald/3a/b1b/769
ANDERS Juhl, Museum Coordinator/ Sound Artist/ Musicologist, Karen Blixen Museum, DENMARK
Anders is coordinator at the Karen Blixen Museum. With a background as composer, concept-developer, fundraiser and organizer in visual arts, literature, filmmaking and music production, Anders has become an all-purpose tool to the museum.
As a composer and music producer, Anders wrote music for film and theatre, among other things giving musical instruction to British actors Terry Jones and Alan Rickman. A gradual change of direction in Anders life came with meeting Michelle Eistrup and the introduction to postcolonial writing as well as panafricanism through Dudley Thompson. He critically evaluated the festival My World Images, run by the Danish Center for Culture and worked as creative consultant at the Danish Music Rights Organization, among other things documenting the need for a more inclusive and collaborative approach to the Danish music support systems. Anders has taken part in the conceptual and practical development of projects such as Face á Face and NotAboutKarenBlixen. (see Michelle Eistrup bio) and works closely together with Michelle Eistrup creating the sound for her art videos. Anders might dive into late night entertainment with his saxophone or at a piano, and he has taken a week off his practical duties at the Karen Blixen Museum to participate in BAT. He holds a M.A in Music and B.A in Law from the University of Copenhagen.
NICHOLAS Laughlin, Editor of Caribbean Review of Books, Writer and Co-Director of Alice’s Yard, Co/Organizer of Bocas Literary Festival, Trinidad
Nicholas Laughlin (1975) is a Trinidadian writer with a particular interest in Caribbean literature and art. He is editor of The Caribbean Review of Books (2004–present) and the culture and travel magazine Caribbean Beat (2003–2006, 2012–present). He is also co-director of the contemporary arts space Alice Yard and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival. His reviews and essays have been published in various periodicals, and many are collected at his website, nicholaslaughlin.com. He has also edited Letters from London (2003), a collection of early essays by C.L.R. James; and an expanded, re-annotated edition of V.S. Naipaul’s early family correspondence, Letters Between a Father and Son (2009). His poems have been published in several magazines and journals.
www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com
DR. CARLOS Moore, Historian/Writer, Brazil/Cuba
Dr. CARLOS MOORE is a Cuban-born Political scientist/Ethnologist/Writer with two doctorates from the University of Paris-7 (FRANCE). He is fluent in five languages.
During the Castro-Batista civil war he fled to the US at age 15. There a chance meeting with Maya Angelou introduced him to the black political and literary world. Becoming a Marxist and Black Nationalist at 16, he was involved in the U.N. Security Council riots, in 1961, in protest of the assassination of Congolese Premier Minister, Patrice Lumumba. That same year, he returned to Cuba to support the revolution. Shocked at the levels of racism still in force in society, he joined black dissidents such as the Afro-Cuban historian and theorist, Walterio Carbonell, and was jailed twice. Subsequently, in 1963, at the age of 21, he left Cuba for North Africa.
During three decades of exile, Moore lived and worked in Nigéria, Senegal, the US, France, the Caribbean and Brazil as a journalist or an academic. In 1987 he organized a three-day “International Conference on Negritude,” in Miami FL, in homage to Aimé Césaire. Césaire delivered his now famous and definitive statement Discourse on Negritude, at that momentous gathering
Moore has written several books on how the cold war strongly affected the decolonization process in Africa and the Caribbean. He has shown how black identity has been neglected inside Cuba, but was played up internationally when Cuba tried to extend its communistic influence to several African countries. He has authored eight books, including, Fela: This Bitch of a Life (Abuja; Cassava Republic Press, 2010; Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009; London: Allison & Busby, 1982; Paris: Karthala Edições, 1982); African Presence in the Americas (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1995); Castro the Blacks and Africa (Los Angeles: CASS/UCLA, 1988).
Carlos Moore currently lives in Brazil researching the impact of race in Latin America.
DIVINE SPIRITS
DR. JOSEPH Adandé, Art Historian, Former Head of the Department of History and Archeology, University of Abomey-Calavi, BENIN
In his writings Joseph Adandé has pinpointed how museums in West Africa are monumental structures introduced by colonialism. Their architecture is not only colonial – their audience also tends to be up till present an elitist group of people. He has suggested that the market place, the workshops of artisans, houses of owners of heritage and other traditional sites for gatherings could be new spaces for art and audience.
Dr. Adandé was the scientifical advisor in 2010 of the exhibition on artists of Danhomé, which exhibited artifacts created by local Fon artists in the XIXth century at the Quai Branly in Paris.
ERY Cámara, Curator, Art Historian, Museo De Arte Moderno, MEXICO/SENEGAL
Ery Cámara is an artist, a critic and a curator from Senegal. Since 1975, he lives and works in México where he studied Conservation of works of Arts and has a Master in Museology. He has collaborated in institutions like INAH (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) conserving colonial ruins of pre-Columbian sites. His interest for the art has moved him to create with well-known colleagues, the International symposium for theory in Contemporary Art, a foundation. 2004 he is chief curator at San Ildefonso museum where he organized exhibitions like Antoni Gormley, Annette Messager Ron Mueck, Vik Muniz, Josef and Annie Albers, Renné Burri, David lachapelle, Mario Testino, and Subjective Photography from Germany.
http://www.sanildefonso.org.mx/
BEATE Cegelskia, Director of Galleri Image, Denmark/Poland
Since 1990, Beate Cegielska has curated numerous group and individual exhibitions and cultural exchanges of Danish and foreign artists. Among many countries she has curated shows in South Korea, China and India. Also since many years Ms. Cegielska has participated as a reviewer in various international art photography festivals around the world. She is currently the director of the non-commercial Galleri Image showing photographic and video art. Founded in 1977 it is Scandinavia's oldest gallery for photographic art.
FLORENT Couao-Zotti, Writer/Journalist/La Nouvelle Tribune, Benin,
Florent Couao-Zotti (born 1964) is a writer of comics, plays, and short stories, who lives in Cotonou. He is fond of employing the short story as a form. He is a professor of literature, the general secretary of the writers’ association in Benin and editor of several satirical magazines and a cultural columnist. His latest work includes the play Sortir de la nuit from 2011 and the novel Si la Cour du mouton est sale, ce n’est pas au porc de le dire published in 2010.
http://www.ndze.com/couao-zotti/oeuvrezotti.htm
http://www.ndze.com/couao-zotti/oeuvrezotti.htm
PROF. C. DANIEL Dawson, Curator/ Lecturer of African Diaspora, Columbia/New York University/Curator, U.S.A.
C. Daniel Dawson has lectured at the House of World Cultures-Berlin, the Kit Tropenmuseum-Amsterdam, the University of California-Berkeley, University of Texas-Austin, University of Wisconsin-Madison, The New School for Social Research, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the Federal University of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro-Brazil. Professor Dawson has also taught seminars on African Spirituality in the Americas at the University of Iowa, NYU, and Yale University. He has a research focus on the African diaspora and its Culture. In addition, Dawson has worked as a photographer, filmmaker, curator, arts administrator, and consultant. He served as curator of photography, film and video at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), director of special projects at the Caribbean Cultural Center (NYC), and curatorial consultant and director of education at the Museum for African Art (NYC). As a photographer, he has shown his work in more than 30 exhibitions. He has also curated and co-curated more than 40 exhibitions, such as Artificial Afrika at GAS Gigantic Art Space in New York. Moreover, he gave special assistance to scholar Robert Farris Thomson with the exhibit and his book, Face of the Gods, the Artists and their altars, the exhibition links the visual grammar of altar traditions of West African (Yoruba) and Central African (Kongo) civilizations with those of Yoruba and Kongo descendants in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico and in Black and Latino North America. It was originally exhibited at the Museum for African Art in New York, and which travelled to University Art Museum, Berkeley, Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama. Dawson has been Associated with many prize-winning films, including Head and Heart by James Mannas and Capoeiras of Brazil by Warrington Hudlin.
http://www.gallatin.nyu.edu/academics/faculty/cdd1.html
http://www.giganticartspace.com/artificialafrika/
MICHELLE Eistrup, Visual Artist/ co-founder of Housing Spirits
Michelle Eistrup was born in Copenhagen and has a Jamaican mother and a Danish father. She grew up in Jamaica, Paris and New York and has a BA in Social Anthropology from Haverford College. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, and presently lives in Denmark. Her work focuses on mapping identities and understanding the route of decolonisation of her own past in the Caribbean and history, and reinvestigating newer routes and ideologies that one can trace through visuals and history. Her photography night explorations is about the finding poetic entrances into this time frame, and helps her to overcome her fear of wanderings at night in Jamaica. It is through the investigation of other time frames, and current stories that she is able to map an understanding of cross-political aftermaths left from years ago, and how these common form of politics are also shared in the identities of these citizens in their daily lives, without any clue that there are similarities of living and cultural mayhap out there. We are still victims of our baggage of our history without this knowledge we are constantly in repetitive stances, and the new can only come through insight, and finding new approaches to navigate the immense potential we have as human beings.
Eistrup has recently co-curated two exhibitions for My World IMAGES Festival, NOT ABOUT KAREN BLIXEN with curator Brooke Minto, US and FACE À FACE together with curator and artist Amadou Kane Sy, Senegal. Eistrup has exhibited in art institutions and galleries in Europe, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, including institutions like Aarhus Art Museum, Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Arnolfini (London), Momentum Nordic Festival for Modern Art (Moss, Norway), The Modern Museum (Stockholm), Sparwasser (Berlin), Kuala Lumpur, Fine Art Museum (Malaysia), The Taitu Art Center (Ethiopia) and The National Art Gallery (Kingston, Jamaica). As a co-founder of the group Housing Spirits, Michelle Eistrup has, together with researchers, practitioners and artists in Benin and Denmark, disseminated the knowledge of traditional Vodun mythology, ideology and philosophy.
BRITT Kramvig, Researcher/Filmmaker NORWAY
Britt Kramvig is a Norwegian social anthropologist and filmmaker of Sámi origin, who publish academic as well as more lyric texts on the postcolonial condition of the Saami people in the Arctic region. In addition she involve herself in collaboratory work with different artist, filmmaking and writes newspaper columns on a regional scene. Temporarily she works as Assoc. prof. at the University of Tromsø, and as a producer at Sonar film (www.sonarfilm.no). Kramvig hold the Chair at the Program board on the Master of Indigenous Studies, University of Tromsø.
Her publication is among others: Contradiction, Emancipation and Multiculturalism after the 22th of July 2011, i Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 3/2011 Vol. 36: nr. 3, What is the landscape where I come from? I: Hotel Polar Capital. Kirkenes: Sami Art Festival and “Le langage silencieux du don dans les communautés arctiques” I Ethnologie francaise, XXXIX, 2009,2.
http://uit.no/ansatte/organisasjon/ansatte/person?p_document_id=108052&p_dimension_id=88153
CHARL Landvreugd, Visual Artist/Art Historian, Surinam/Holland
Charl Landvreugd’s research as practice revolves around the idea and the construction of Blackness as an aesthetic, political, philosophical and mythological concept. He uses these constructions to speak about exclusions based on ethnic and national differences while highlighting cultural similarities. In his writings Charl Landvreugd discusses parameters of a specific Black Dutch aesthetics. He asserts that Europeansensibilities towards ethnic differences are constructed differently and we should therefore refrain from falling into definitions that are derivedsolely from British and American models. He wishes to avoid defining everything under the guise of multiculturalism, and instead, searches for the specifics of a larger Afro-European aesthetics.
In his performance piece Movt nr.4 and video installation Atlantic Transformerz the models repeat the process of blackening the black body,and adorns it while continuing to add black materials resulting in sculptural forms made of different black materiality. Visually, this isone of the ways in which Landvreugd explores ideas of contemporary Blackness through lived experience in a European context.
Charl Landvreugd is a Fulbright scholar who has exhibited in the US, the Caribbean, South America and Europe. His writings have appeared in severalpublications. He is the featured artist in issue nr.5 of Arc Magazine. (http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/ )
www.charll.com
IDA Brændholt Lundgaard, Advisor, Heritage Agency of Denmark Museums
Ida has specialised in Education in Museums and Galleries, Intercultural Learning and Visual Arts and Culture- and Education policy. Focus in her work has always been on Culture and Education in a Democratic Formation Perspective. She is Master of Arts; Master of Nordic Literature and Language and Master of Art History, educated from Copenhagen University 1993.
Ida is working as Senior Adviser in the department for Cultural Institutions and Operational Support, Danish Agency for Culture. She has been Project Manager for The Education Plan for Danish Museums, a National framework aiming at improving the Educational role of Danish Museum in Society, and also she has been Museum Advisor for Art Museums since 2007. Alongside she is Associate Professor at the Department of Education, Århus University and former Associate Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Ida has been Head of Education at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art from 1996 to 2007 and during that period she collaborated on numerous European and National project on Culture and Education exploring new strategies in working with Arts and Education in Museums and Galleries. She has been Member of Engage – The National Association for Gallery Education, UK, Member and co-funder of MID (Museum Educators in Denmark), Member of ICOM, SECA / INTERCOM. During her career she has produced numerous publications and lectures nationally and internationally on the educational role of museums in society and museum education.
JAMES Muriuki, Visual Artist/Former Curator of RaMoMA, Kenya
James Muriuki works as a photographer, graphic designer and was a curator at the Rahimtulla Museum of Modern Art (RaMoMA), Nairobi, where he worked since it’s opening in 2001. In 2010, he, together with Miriam Syowia Kyambi and Dr. Kivubiro Tabawebbula founded 3Collect, an artist’s collective engaging the curatorial practice, which he works under besides other individual curatorial engagements.
He says, “Over time, I have taken interest in exploration of gaps and spaces that are left by using photography and other art media. I endeavor to use photography as a medium of practicing art rather than as a photographer either alone or collaboratively. This has extended from photographic experiments to using photo-based medium and new digital media within a personal attitude and aesthetic. It is a personal journey that has kept proving dynamic and yet static in many ways within my environment.”
Recently he was awarded 2nd prize in 4th Photoafrica contest, which took place within 8th African Film Festival of Tarifa. He had a retrospective at Goethe Institute in Nairobi, is part of the Walther Collection in Ulm, Germany and he has exhibited in Snap Judgments:New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, curated by Okwui Enwezor.
At present, he is experimenting with motion, video and alternative ways of using photography and combining it with other media - ultimately exploring photography as a medium and a process of making art. He has collaborated with artists from different countries on new works over residencies and workshops as well as on a personal edict.
James lives and works in Nairobi and his work has been exhibited and collected in Kenya, South Africa, USA, Denmark, Spain, and Germany among other countries.
www.anotherafrica.net/tag/james-muriuki
www.whatsupkenya.com/page5_november_2010.html
www.creativeafricanetwork.com/person/1759