Chants, Dreams and Other Grammars of Love
Dear friends, artists, comrades and colleagues,
We invite you to contribute to a commemorative anthology celebrating the life and work of Professor Harry Oludare Garuba (1958-2020); poet, literary scholar, teacher, mentor, and beloved friend.
Harry Garuba has been described as “the magnetic force of lasting and legendary friendships” (Raji 2020), an ever-present power “in the conviviality of people that he […] nurtured, comforted and added in his ever-expanding circle of inclusion” (Fuh 2020), “African intellectual and icon” (Kessi 2020), and “one of the world’s finest and most innovative poets” (Omoyele 2020).
Titled Chants, Dreams and Other Grammars of Love, this collection seeks to gather stories, poems, and reminiscences about our beloved friend and teacher and his engagement with, and contributions to society, people and literature. We envision this anthology as a fête, praise song, dirge, sendero, faithful witnessing, an open place for remembering and healing for the great loss of an exceptional mind.
Please send single or multiple submissions of poems, stories, tributes and artwork to: othergrammarsoflove@gmail.com, and copy remiraji at gmail.com.
Please send your entry only in word format (not PDF) and indicate your full or pen name and affiliation. (Artwork only in jpeg format).
Submissions are accepted until October 30, 2020.
Editorial Team: Remi Raji • Josephine Alexander • Oyeniyi Okunoye • Natasha Himmelman • Bongani Kona • Idowu Omoyele
The CAA’s Committee on Diversity Practices invites papers for its session soliciting contributors
CAA 2021 Annual Conference, February 10-13, 2021
New York City, and online (due to the Covid-19 pandemic)
Chair: Claudia Marion Stemberger / CAA’s Committee on Diversity Practices
Independent Scholar, Johannesburg and Vienna [www.artandtheory.net]
Global Diversity @CAA: Locational Meanings of Diversity in Art History
Diversity and inclusion have been a major area of interest within the CAA. Surveys on diversity in the contemporary university, such as that conducted by Sara Ahmed (2012), have shown how the diversity discourse has been performatively used by these institutions in order to shield them from critique, thus rather perpetuating inequality.
Moreover, art historian Steven Nelson has observed that “with questions of diversity, it’s so local, and one has to look at the local context to see what diversity actually means” (2019). Among CAA’s Committee on Diversity Practices, the subject of global diversity has currently gained fresh prominence, with scholars debating the locational meanings of diversity in art history. However, there has been little discussion at the CAA’s annual conference about global diversity.
The aim of this panel is to look into global institutional frameworks of diversity. To what extent do we need to take the situatedness of heterogeneous locales of diversity into account—at a particular time in history / in a specific societal context? How is the concept of diversity taught, negotiated, and researched in global / locational contexts of art history? To what extent will these insights into global diversity then allow ourselves to possibly navigate diversity policies in the US in a different way?
With its North American majority in mind, this panel provides an opportunity to advance the CAA members’ understanding of global cultures of diversity in art history, acknowledging locational challenges of inequity and pluralism in global higher education across the world.
Please submit the CFP proposal form [including title, abstract (250 words) and shortened CV] by Wednesday September 16, 2020.
Contact Email: stemberger@artandtheory.net
Participation requirements: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2021/cfp.cg
About the Committee on Diversity Practices [College Art Association / CAA]
The CAA’s Committee on Diversity Practices supports the development of global perspectives on art and visual culture. The committee promotes artistic, curatorial, scholarly, and institutional practices that deepen appreciation of political and cultural heterogeneity as educational and professional values. To that end, the committee assesses and evaluates the development and implementation of curricular innovation, new research methods, curatorial and pedagogical strategies, and hiring practices that contribute to the realization of these goals.
In 2018, CAA established a Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion role on the board of directors. In the same year, the organization issued a Values Statement on Diversity and Inclusion, which unequivocally supports all individuals who work in the visual arts and defines inclusion as an evolving and collaborative process. A record number of sessions at the 2018 Annual Conference and the 2019 Annual Conference reinforced CAA’s focus on diversity and inclusion.
Call for Action: A History of the World in 100 Objects
After gathering a core group for our launch event in Kingston, Jamaica in 2019, we are now looking for further contributors.
We are seeking writers, researchers, curators, artists and activists who will pick one object from the British Museum podcast and present ideas on how their narrative could be expanded through new stories and formats(e.g. cartoons, photo essays, poetry, or alternative museum labels) for a new multi-language and multi-format publication project. To ensure accessibility we plan to publish contributions through a range of different media, including website, podcasts, and a book. We encourage authors to draw on methods and literature beyond the ‘Western canon’ and English, with an output being a refreshed bibliography (possibly with translated texts) for ‘object biographies’ with a more inclusive range of philosophies that might inject much needed critique into a discourse dominated by Western-style scholarship.
Case studies might address local resistance to colonial, metropolitan or elite collecting and preservation practices; ‘alternative’ and personal engagements with material culture; the role of anthropology, archaeology, and ethnography as colonial field-sciences; the aftermaths of scientific exploration and ‘race theories’; the role of ancient empires and their material legacies in identity-building in modern empires and nations; oral histories or traditions surrounding or emanating from these objects; evocations of the landscapes or memoryscapes in which these objects were once made meaningful; or future imaginings of their return or representation; to only name a few of many possibilities.
Priority will be given to marginalized voices, ethnic minority writers, and in particular to contributors from communities of origin or association of these objects. Submission can and should be multilingual. Submissions in languages other than English are welcome and will be translated. We are also able to consider posting anonymous contributions if the content might compromise individuals’ positions in their home countries. Contributions should address a general audience, not experts, and inclusive language is required, i.e. authors should avoid racist, sexist, transphobic, ableist, classist and/or insulting language (unless contextually relevant with regard to quoting historical sources). Final decisions lie with the editors.
Please submit your 250-400 words proposal. Contributors may pick one object from the original podcast series, and explain how you will depart from the original narrative through new approaches, stories, and different or comparable objects. We welcome the choice of a different object from the British Museum or even another museum where the proposal, and paper, can demonstrate why the ‘original list’ is inadequate and how your choice will fill the gap in the objects list and approach. Please submit your proposals by November 15, 2020. If accepted, final contributions should follow soon thereafter, and, if submitted in text form, should be approximately 2500 words long.
CFP: Reclaim: Narratives of African Women Artists
École du Louvre Paris, France 15 and 16 April 2021
This symposium is part of a wider collaboration with the Africa 2020 Season, a pan-African and multidisciplinary project taking place in France from December 2020 to mid-July 2021. Africa 2020 is an invitation, by N’Goné Fall, General Commissioner of the Season, to look at and understand the world from an African perspective. In this context, the AWARE association: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions whose goal is to improve the exposure of 20th century women artists, sought the expertise of scholars, artists and curators from Africa and around the world to raise the issue of the visibility of women artists in Africa.
This symposium intends to bring together researchers from various horizons in order to shed light on the research on African women artists and to bring African perspectives to the foundational narratives of art history. The past few decades have seen concerted drive in Europe and the United States to produce global art histories, with little participation by scholars from other parts of the world, especially Africa. Alongside this initiative is an unprecedented growth in research and writing on modern and contemporary African art. Major monographs on individual artists, groups and national art movements have appeared in recent years. Yet, only very few women artists have featured in these publications, despite that they played important roles in the making of these histories. This symposium offers a critical platform for established and emerging scholars to evaluate and re-examine existing histories and archives as well as recover new ones to more fully account for the significance of work by African women artists past and present. Among the guiding questions for this symposium are: How have modern and contemporary art history in Africa been written? Which histories, media, identities, genders have been forgotten and which have been overlooked? Which new narratives do we need for the writing of more comprehensive future art histories?
The proposed interventions can explore the following four axes destined to create a framework of reflection around the theme of narratives:
➢ Lost narratives: Who are the women whose stories we are at risk of losing? How do we fill this gap? ➢ Narratives of Womanhood: What does it mean to be a “woman artist”? How do notions of “the feminine” or “womanhood” shape what is accepted, recorded, or understood in the formation of art historical narratives? ➢ Narratives of media: What are the relationships between gender and medium? How have the politics of materials and techniques played formative roles in the shaping discourses about women in the arts? How might we challenge or undermine these? ➢ Institutional narratives: What role have institutions played in entrenching the underrepresentation of women in the arts? What responsibility should institutions assume in creating more equitable systems of representation moving forward? What are alternative institutional models that are more inclusive?
Presentations will last 20 minutes and will be illustrated with slide presentations. They will be filmed and recorded, and some of them may eventually be published as articles in a publication dedicated to the event or on AWARE’s website.
Paper Proposals
The proposals are to be sent in PDF format to aware.africa2020@gmail.com before 15 October 2020 and must include an abstract (in French or English) of approximately one page (maximum 2,000 characters), a title, 4 to 8 images, and a Curriculum Vitae.
Accepted proposals will be communicated by 30 November 2020.
Presentations can be in French or English.
CFP: Video Art and Africa
AHH Annual Conference
This session invites paper proposals that explore the deployment of video art by artists from Africa. Developed in the 1960s, video art emerged in the era of decolonisation, and its accessible technologies were later taken up by many people who had stories to tell. It is a medium of relative historical recentness and today favoured by artists operative in global contemporary networks. However, in comparison to the vast and growing literature on African cinema, there is relatively little scholarship on video art from Africa. This session seeks to explore how artists from Africa have specifically employed the languages enabled by video, such as montage, the loop, repetition and duration, to work through both the distant and more recent pasts in Africa.
We are particularly interested in video works that explore histories of colonialism, decolonisation and nation-building projects. The archival turn in art has led artists to rework historical documents through video to elucidate local experiences and to contest old and clichéd assumptions with something previously unthought, unheard or unseen. These practices raise questions as to who owns history and how historical documents can be performed within the distinct needs and expectations of the present. Simultaneously, video has stepped in to address feminist histories, questions of labour, race and class, as well as transregional alliances. The panel thus invites proposals for papers which explore the potential, as well as possible shortcomings, of video art for addressing these histories.
Abstract max. 250 words. Deadline 19 October 2020.
Please email your paper proposal to the session convenors using the Paper Proposal Form (https://bit.ly/3eVYWZu).
Link to the session information: https://eu-admin.eventscloud.com/website/2065/video-art-and-africa/
Katarzyna Falęcka, Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT), Falecka.Katarzyna@caorc.org
Gabriella Nugent, UCL, gabriella.nugent.14@ucl.ac.uk
Click here to download a PDF of this abstract
CFP: Global Art History and the Imbalance of Power
Only when a multiplicity of perspectives exist in dialogue can we talk of art history becoming globalised as a discipline. Our panel addresses this provocation and argues not simply for the extended coverage of global art in art-historical literature, but to decentre existing hegemonies and respond to global power imbalances with art-historical tools. Through specific case studies, the panel will bring to prominence marginalised perspectives and aesthetic approaches from beyond the Euro-American canon, which are often difficult to access even when on exhibit. Focusing on what global art history is in practice, the panel will address theoretical and methodological approaches, especially in relation to the imbalance of power expressed in the academic discipline itself.
We welcome papers which illuminate these areas of investigation, including perspectives from artists and curators as well as interdisciplinary approaches. Topics may include: methods of contemporary global art history, experimental case studies in the field, the anthropology of art, visualising identity in contemporary art, problematising current power relations, exploring mechanisms of marginalisation and inclusion, artistic activism, defining global art and art history, non-Western art and the accusation of self-exoticism, shifts within the decolonial gaze, geopolitics and gender politics of contemporary art.
Deadline 19 October 2020
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Barber Institute of Fine Art, University of Birmingham, K.V.Z.Carroll@bham.ac.uk
Stacey Kennedy, Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, SEK525@student.bham.ac.uk
Azadeh Sarjoughian, Barber Institute of Fine Art, University of Birmingham, AXS1408@student.bham.ac.uk
#forarthistory2021 http://forarthistory.org.uk/our-work/conference/2021-annual-conference/…
CfP “African Cultural Heritages: The Political Performances of Objects”
Coordinated by Alexandre Girard-Muscagorry ( Musée de la musique, Centre de recherche sur la conservation) and Marian Nur Goni (CESSMA)
Deadline for submission of proposals: 1st November 2020
The gestures and “heritage emotions” (Fabre 2013) of politicians such as Georges Pompidou, Jacques Chirac and Emmanuel Macron in France have been extensively analysed and commented on, as have those of a handful of their African counterparts, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor (Harney 2004) and, to a lesser extent, Menelik II (Sohier 2012), Kwame Nkrumah (Hess 2001; Lentz 2017), Mobutu Sese Seko (White 2006; Malaquais 2008; Van Beurden 2015) and King Njoya (Geary 1994; Galitzine-Loumpet 2016). However, what do we actually know about the way African heads of state and their advisers, high-ranking officials and other political figures and activists considered the political role of heritage or, at a micro level (which is the scope of this issue) of sets of objects, from a personal, national and international perspective during the colonial and postcolonial periods? How did they and do they act on the definition of objects and their trajectories, thus creating the conditions for new layers of meaning (Kopytoff 1986)? At the same time, how do popular practices inform, inflect and appropriate these object conceptions in a back-and-forth dynamic?
This special issue is thus devoted to a study of the entire spectrum of official actors, from civil servants to heads of state, interacting with entities or individuals outside the state sphere (kings, non-governmental organizations, donors, citizen associations, etc.), who develop gestures, conceptions and narratives that create or reshape, assign or promote singular, political uses of objects in Africa.
At the intersection of state policies and individual itineraries, of protocols and affects and of materiality and symbols, this issue questions the processes leading up to the political investment of objects – beyond museum institutions and destinations – by focusing in particular on the circulations, stagings and uses of objects, as well as on the narratives they carry and provoke, from both a historical and contemporary point of view.
Thematic Axes
Submissions may engage with any of the following themes, which can be studied from a regional, national, transnational, diasporic or even transcontinental perspective, and within different time frames. For detailed descriptions of the four axes, please see the full-length calls in English and French.
- The Politics of Objects Exhibited: Actors, Gestures and Places
- Supply Networks and Regimes of Value
- The Politics of Objects through the Prism of Social Practices and Popular Imagination
- The African Making of Restitutions, from Independence to the Present Day
Calendar
1st November 2020: Deadline for submission of paper proposals (in French or English) to Alexandre Girard-Muscagorry (girardmuscagorry@gmail.com) and Marian Nur Goni (m.nurgoni@gmail.com)
10 November 2020: Notification to authors of acceptance or rejection of their proposal.
10 March 2021: deadline for submission of articles to Alexandre Girard-Muscagorry (girardmuscagorry@gmail.com) and Marian Nur Goni (m.nurgoni@gmail.com).
For more information on the format of articles to be submitted, see the instructions to authors.
Research survey: The COVID-19 Impact Survey : African and African Diaspora visual arts community
We invite academics and artists to submit Research Posters that connect to themes outlined below:
https://bham.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/artist-impact-survey-african-and-african-diaspora-visual-2
The creative sector worldwide has been substantially affected by the global pandemic of COVID-19 and the associated social restrictions. This survey contributes to an understanding of these effects and focuses on the challenges and responses from the African and African Diaspora visual arts community.
The findings will be summarised through a series of blog posts and the production of an illustrative dashboard with public access. Published results are always anonymised. Ultimately the survey will contribute to a research publication which assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts community globally.
Your participation is voluntary. If you choose to add your contact details at the end of the survey you will be kept up to date as information is disseminated and asked if you would like to participate in follow up research. There is no obligation to do this.
Who can take part?
Anyone who considers them self an African or African Diaspora person (North or Sub-Saharan African) working in the visual arts can participate. Participants may live or work anywhere in the world.
If you choose to take part, the survey comprises 22 short questions. You do not have to log in or sign up to anything. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.
Your data will be held confidentially and only used for the research purposes as stated.
Funding for survey
The survey is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK (AHRC) and Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership UK (M4C) and conducted by a researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK.
The research has been registered for Ethical Review: Reference number ERN_18-1644.
Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact:
artistimpactsurveyc19@gmail.com
N Real Time: Now Collecting Experiences: COVID-19 INDEX
by ART library deco
This platform has been created for people of color to share their experiences during the COVID-19 – Coronavirus Pandemic. Selected data, stories, images, audio and videos will be published via an online African American digital art library: ART | library deco.
These works will be published in our digital-arts journal: reduxx, and all submissions will be archived in our online repository in 2021. Feel free to share an experience directly or upload various types of media. Submission Deadline: December 31, 2020. #hashtag: #blackcovid19index
*Disclaimer: All participants must have a gmail.com account to upload materials to database form.
Submit Work Here: https://tinyurl.com/blackcovid19