1-54 Forum London 2021 | Poetry Salon: On Fragile Ground

Being “African” in the so-called “Middle East”: Curating our Multiple Selves with Touria El Glaoui, Dr. Omar Kholeif and Dr. Ridha Moumni. How does one define one’s sense of ‘African-ness’ in an age where slippages around both language and its comprehension; visuality and its contradictions, are no longer subject to the binary of a singular form of identarian position or politics. In this series of stories and provocations, speakers reflect on the evolving definition of African legacies and heritage and consider the contradictions that arise when a creative individual occupies more than a single identity. https://www.1-54.com/

The Poetry Salon: (My) Episodes of Everyday Racism, Interrupted with Raymond Antrobus, Phoebe Boswell, Lakwena Maciver, Andra Simons, and Dr. O.Drawing inspiration in-part from Grada Kilomba’s book, Plantation Memories, and Lola Olufemi’s Feminism, Interrupted, the FORUM’s second edition of the poetry salon invites artists and writers to present and reflect on poems that disrupt and challenge the very concept of ‘everyday racism’. The mask, the mouth, and the wound are expressed and amplified from the interstices of silence — not marginal, but rather, enabling new centres of reclaimed imagination to come to bear. Merging oral testimony, with the diaristic, the meditative, and the propulsive — the readings are followed by a group discussion of lived experience, and the power of ‘interruption’ facilitated through the singularity of the voice. https://www.1-54.com/

Introduction & Exhibition Itineraries with Dr. ‘Ugochukwu-Smooth’ Nzewi and Dr. Omar Kholeif ‘Ugochukwu-Smooth’ Nzewi is an artist, art historian, and curator who currently serves as the inaugural Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Both trained as artists, Nzewi and Kholeif, take a winding path through the exhibition halls of memory, reflecting on the projects that inspired and gave route to formative trajectories, such as the Dak’Art Biennial in Senegal, through to the art spaces, that nourished and inspired them — from Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. In this conversation, the duo negotiates the tension between the notion of ‘tradition’ in art history against the accumulated concept of the contemporary. They consider the ethnographic and the anthropological in a dialogue that summons individual ways of looking and narrating art of Africa and its diasporas. https://www.1-54.com/

Ageing Ruins…: A Listening Session with Otobong Nkanga and a response by Dr. O.Otobong Nkanga, one of the leading artistic voices of her generation, returns to FORUM to present four tracks from her forthcoming vinyl record release, developed from her award-winning installation, ‘Ageing Ruins Dreaming Only to Recall the Hard Chisel from the Past,’ at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, commissioned as part of Sharjah Biennial 14. Here, audiences are invited to an intimate evocation that explores the use of the artist’s voice within her practice, proffering possibilities and questions about the multiple forms of imagination that can be conjured through this form of embodiment. Here, the duo discusses the voice in relation to the body as a site contingency with its natural surroundings — the environment, which is forever transmuting, seeping through our hands, as much as it is responding to the contours of our hands. A discussion with the audience will follow. https://www.1-54.com/

Narrating our “Pan-Afrikan” Connections: Claudette Johnson and Marlene Smith in-dialogue with Lubaina HimidMarlene Smith is a multi-disciplinary artist and curator recognised for her research on Black Artists and Modernism in the UK. Claudette Johnson, known for her large-scale figurative drawings, are acknowledged for their ‘defiant’ contribution to the study of Black visuality. Both Claudette Johnson and Marlene Smith were co-founders of the East-Midlands based, BLK Group formed in Wolverhampton in 1979, setting the stage for the anti-racist discourse of the British Black arts movement, which would follow the early 1980s. Lubaina Himid is an artist, who spent much of her life working to create space for herself and other Black women in the UK’s artistic ecosystem, simultaneously operating as a curator, cultural historian, and as an educator. Here, she speaks to Marlene Smith and Claudette Johnson about the complexities of negotiating one’s individual artistic practice, while also giving credence to the effective power of collective movement and action in shaping and nuancing our multiple histories of art. The panel draws its title from an exhibition held at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in 1983. https://www.1-54.com/

Intro to FORUM & Overture Number 2/A Re-Play: Koyo Kouoh: The Curator as Storyteller with Dr. Omar KholeifKoyo Kouoh, Executive Director, and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town and Founding Director of RAW Materials Company in Dakar, in conversation with Kholeif, narrates a path — as a storyteller who weaves and builds upon the intimacies of human relationships. Here, Kouoh, leads, guides, and enables us through her commitment to a nurturing curatorial practice of multiple convenings with artists and curators. How did this all begin, and where to from here, for Koyo Kouoh? The path may not always have been traditional, perhaps even thorny, but Koyo has utilised divergent routes to construct pavements for African artists, authors, historians, and curators to be seen. What shall, and can we do together? In this talk, curator Kholeif, invites Koyo to walk down lanes of memory, to a beginning — tracing itineraries, developing maps, and building worlds, which might offer audiences an inventory for how to consider art in the present. https://www.1-54.com/

1-54 FORUM New York 2022 May 21-22, 2022 (22/05/2022)Interlocking Histories (4:00 pm EST)Two new exhibitions opening in October 2022 examine the engagement of African and African American artists creating new art in the 1940s through the 60s, that fostered transnational conversations and upended notions of modernity depicted by African artists. Kimberli Gant, PhD, co-curator of Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club, and moderator Niama Safia Sandy will discuss and preview some of the featured art, and illuminate this time in art history.https://www.1-54.com/

1-54 FORUM New York 2022 May 21-22, 2022 (22/05/2022)Archiving, Reclamation, and Authoring Your History (2:00 pm EST)The renaissance of archival resources and collections that center global Black experiences has fostered an appetite for a better understanding of how we define archives and how archival collections can be employed in the cultural arts. Whose narratives do the archives hold and what is missing? Should artists think about the archive as a mode of legacy building? Steven G. Fullwood (Nomadic Archivist Project), ceramicist King Houndekpinkou, Rianna Jade Parker (Brief History of Black British Art), and moderator Novella Ford are storytellers, archivists, researchers, and artists who will engage these questions and share their journeys to and through archives.https://www.1-54.com/

1-54 FORUM New York 2022 May 21-22, 2022 (21/05/2022)Textiles and the Global Politic of the Black Arts Movement (4:00pm EST)A conversation with Harlem-born fiber artist Dindga McCannon and art collector and gallerist Lewis Long will explore the influence of McCannon’s Harlem upbringing, the politics that gave way to the creation of the Weusi Artist Collective and Where We At Black Women Artists Inc., and the enduring use of textiles in artmaking today.https://www.1-54.com/

1-54 FORUM New York 2022 May 21-22, 2022 (21/05/2022)Under the Influence of Édouard Glissant (1:00pm EST)Martinican poet, novelist, philosopher, and academic, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011), is considered one of the greatest writers and thinkers of his generation. What can the theories and writings of Glissant help us to understand about navigating and preserving cultural complexities? How can they operate in artmaking, criticism, and artists serving spaces? Tiana Webb Evans, art maven, brand strategist, and founder of The Jamaica Art Society, with artist Johanna Mirabel, will consider and reconsider these questions and explore Mirabel’s work in this context.https://www.1-54.com/