12 June 2024
Balzaal, Wereldmuseum Rotterdam
Wereldmuseum Willemskade 25 3016 DM Rotterdam
Public Event | 12 June 2024 | 10:00 - 18:00 | Balzaal, Wereldmuseum Rotterdam
Conference Description
The collections of the Wereldmuseum hold both historic and contemporary art from across the African continent as well as the African Diaspora. We have been curating these works in temporary and permanent exhibitions for several decades. While we have long been critical of our curatorial and collecting practices, we are currently in a focussed moment of assessing our own work in relation to the broader field of the writing of (art) histories today. Moreover, we are aware that our self-questioning comes at a time of growing demands for restitution of objects and for the decolonizing of museums.
For this conference, we are interested to ask how curating African art in the present can respond to these demands. As we rethink our own practices, we are also interested to trace some approaches to writing and curating art from Africa that emerged within art historical and artistic disciplines over the last two centuries. We want to critically reflect on early explorations of primitivism to more recent World Art studies (in Europe), and the different genealogies of African Art Histories in the USA or in Europe. In these considerations, we also want to ask how the discipline of Art History approaches art from Africa by scholars from and on the continent. Through this work, we hope that we can foster new practices for thinking about arts from Africa and its diaspora.
Confirmed participats include: Ernestine White-Mifetu, Zina Saro Wiwa, Amie Soudien, Osei Bonsu, Ola Hassanain, Atiyyah Khan and Petrina Dacres
Image credit: Hélène Akouavi Amouzou, Autoportrait, 2008, work part of Wereldmuseum collection, 7035-4
Location
Morning Program
| 9.30 - 10.00 | Walk-in with Coffee and Tea |
| 10.00 - 10.15 | Welcoming remarks by Wayne Modest |
| 10.20 - 10.40 | Ernestine White-Mifetu |
| 10.45 - 11.45 | Film screening by Zina Saro Wiwa |
| 11.45 - 12.00 | Break |
| 12.00 - 12.20 | Q&A with Zina Saro Wiwa |
| 12.0 - 12.40 | Amie Soudien |
| 12.45 - 13.15 | Panel Discussion with Ernestine White-Mifetu, Amie Soudien and Wayne Modest |
| 13.15 - 14.45 | Lunch Break |
Afternoon Program
| 14.45 – 15.05 | Osei Bonsu |
| 15.10 – 15.30 | Ola Hassanain |
| 15.30 – 16.00 |
Pannel Discussion with Osei Bonsu and Hola Hassanain |
| 16.00 – 16.15 | Break |
| 16.15 – 17.15 | Sound Lecture by Atiyyah Khan |
| 17.15 – 17.35 | Petrina Dacres |
| 17.40 – 18.00 |
Panel Discussion with Atiyyah Khan and Petrina Dacres |
About the Speakers
Petrina Dacres
Dr. Petrina Dacres is Head of the Art History Department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica. Her work and research focus on Caribbean art; African diaspora art; public sculpture and memorials; and memory studies. She is an independent curator and founding member of Tide Rising Art Projects, an organization created to support and promote contemporary Caribbean art and film. Dr. Dacres has organized exhibitions at the International Studios and Curatorial Programmes where she was the 2022 Jane Farver Curatorial Resident, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New York; The National Museum, Jamaica, Kingston; and National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, among others. She is the recent recipient of the Caribbean Cultural Institute Fellowship at the Perez Art Museum, Miami. Currently, she is a research Fellow at the Research Center for Material Culture.
Amie Soudien
Amie Soudien (she/her) is an art writer and researcher invested in the intersections of art, history and gender studies concerning histories of enslavement in South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. Her work explores how contemporary art, performance and the performing arts commemorate enslavement and enslaved women in the present. She is the editor of Lesser Violence: Volume 1 (2022), published by MaThoko's Books (imprint of GALA Queer Archive), and has contributed to ArtThrob, ArtAFRICA, the Mail & Guardian, and Frieze, among others. She is currently completing her PhD in History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Ernestine White-Mifetu
Ernestine White-Mifetu is the Sills Foundation Curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Specializing in the Arts of the African continent, she has twenty years of experience working in the African arts and culture sector, with twelve years working exclusively in national African art museums in curatorial and directorial positions. Throughout her career, her exhibitions have focused on making visible the silenced and forgotten narratives of women of color, explored issues of dislocation and hybridity, perceptions of identity, and the interrogation of colonial narratives imposed on the black and brown body in the work of classical, modern and contemporary artists of and from the African continent. Her current project is reinstalling the African Art Galleries to open in 2026 at the Brooklyn Museum, where she will showcase diverse modes of creative expression from the African continent in conversation with its diasporas. A key focus will be to expand the regionality and temporality of narratives, lived realities, and works of art.
Osei Bonsu
Osei Bonsu is a British-Ghanaian curator and writer based in London and Paris. He is currently a curator of International Art at Tate Modern, where he is responsible for organising exhibitions, developing the museum’s collection and broadening the representation of artists from Africa and the African diaspora. As a leading curator of contemporary art, he has advised museums, art fairs and private collections internationally and mentored emerging artists through his digital platform, Creative Africa Network. Bonsu has worked as a contributing editor for Frieze magazine and has contributed to a number of exhibition catalogues and arts publications including ArtReview, Numero Art and Vogue. Through his writing, Bonsu focuses on the relationship between art and issues of migration, race and identity in contemporary society. He has lectured widely on these subjects at various institutions including the University of Cambridge, Courtauld Institute of Art, and Royal College of Art among others. Bonsu holds a Masters in History of Art from University College London, and a BA in Curatorial Studies from Central Saint Martins. In 2020, he was named as one of Apollo Magazine’s ‘40 under 40’ leading African voices.
