AfricAvenir and the National Arts Gallery of Namibia present BE.BOP 2012- Black Europe Body Politics, an international screening programme and transdisciplinary roundtable centered on Black European citizenship in connection to recent moving image and performative practices.
The main event will take place in Berlin, at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, a translocal theatre space which serves as point of arrival for artists from (post) migrant communities and beyond, founded in 2008 by Shermin Langhoff with the support of Fatih Akın.
In collaboration with AfricAvenir and the National Arts Gallery of Namibia, author and critic Alanna Lockward, the curator of this project, will present a selection of some of the participating artists at the National Arts Gallery of Namibia on 24 April at 7pm. Entrance is free.
This event is dedicated to the Black European Diaspora in relation to performance art and moving image. It is motivated and theoretically embedded to Decolonial Aesthetics and more specifically to Decolonial Diasporic Aesthetics, a term coined by Lockward.
A selection of some of the participating artists will be screened at the NAGN: Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, Jeannette Ehlers, William Kentridge, Tracey Moffatt, IngridMwangiRobertHutter and Emeka Udemba.
With similar formats, the content of this groundbreaking project has been presented at Duke University, Universidad de Cadiz, Matadero Madrid and the Dutch Art Institute and has enabled lively discussions from multiple perspectives and contexts.
Future presentations this year include The Bioscope, Johannesburg, Goldsmiths University of London as well as the 11 Havana Biennial.
Prior to the presentation in Windhoek, Lockward will present BE.BOP at the Conference of the International Association of African Philosophy and Studies taking place in Durban from 16 to 18 April.
The framework of this presentation and the projection of the installations is circumscribed within decolonial theories which expose how the idea of citizenship is linked to current racializing configurations and hence with the limits of humanity. In that sense, the racial hierarchy of human existence, originating in the Renaissance and prescribed legally during the Enlightenment, established current (white-male-heteronormative-Christian-Western) European notions of who is Human and who is lower in that hierarchy, thereby designating citizenship, one of the most important legacies of modernity. The time-based positions discussed at this meeting have been selected because they contest (racializing) fantasies on European citizenship.
By means of analysing these narratives of re-existence, BE.BOP 2012 aims at facilitating a long-term exchange between specialists in disciplines unrelated to visual arts and time-based art practitioners of different contexts of the Black European Diaspora.
The screening of the work of William Kentridge on von Trotha’s extermination order and the German colonial war against the ova Hereros and Namas, Black-Box/Chambre Noir (2005), is part of one of the sessions dedicated to colonial amnesia.
Another of the participating artists, Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, has created a performance in homage of Saartje Baartman http://blackeuropebodypolitics.wordpress.com/news/. In this particular piece created by a Caribbean artist, member of the Black Diaspora in Europe, the legacies of racialization are symbolically challenged across geographical and temporal narratives, enabling a dialogue between artists, thinkers and feminists from different Diaspora and African contexts like participants, Rozena Maart and Simmi Dullay, who are both based in Durban.
