What might an African future look like? How do artists and academics imagine this future? These are some of the questions that the project
African Futures addresses in three concurrent interdisciplinary festivals organized by the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg, Lagos, and Nairobi, all set to explore the future through narrative and artistic expression—within literature as well as visual arts, performance, music, and film, including various digital formats.
Within the
African Futures program, the Goethe-Institut New York hosts part of a videoconference on
The Future of the African Diaspora, with curator
Adrienne Edwards and artist
Wangechi Mutu as our local guests.
Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group, based in London, and
Bonaventure Ndikung, founder and curator of SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, will participate in the conversation from Johannesburg as will
Viny Rodrigues, sociologist and member of Sistema Negro, and poet and essayist
Leda Martins from São Paulo.
Adrienne Edwards is a curator, scholar, and writer whose work focuses on artists of the African diaspora and the global South. She is a curator at Performa and a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University, where she holds the Corrigan Doctoral fellowship. Edwards’s research interpolates visual and time-based art, experimental dance, critical race theory, feminist theory, and post-structuralist philosophy. She has organized performance projects with numerous artists, including Rashid Johnson, Dave McKenzie, Senga Nengudi, Clifford Owens, Benjamin Patterson, and Pope.L. For Performa 15, Edwards has commissioned new projects by Chimurenga, Edgar Arceneaux, Jonathas de Andrade, Laura Lima, Will Rawls, and Juliana Huxtable (with the Museum of Modern Art). Edwards contributes to a variety of exhibition catalogues and art publications, writing on the work of Carrie Mae Weems, Wangechi Mutu, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, David Hammons, Lorraine O’Grady, Tracey Rose, Trajal Harrell, and Ralph Lemon. She writes for institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, High Line Art, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Edwards is currently organizing an exhibition and publication called
Blackness in Abstraction for New York’s Pace Gallery.
Wangechi Mutu was born and raised in Kenya and has made art in New York for almost twenty years. Her work digs deep into investigating gender and racial identity. At the center she often places a performing or posed figure and uses this as a means to focus the eye and to unlock the dialogue about perception in both personal and political realms. Her characters have the appearance of cyborgs or hybrid-species, often altered and enhanced and positioned to imply power, un-knowableness, femaleness with a consciousness of their inherent vulnerability. In their very creation is a questioning of the role each and every one of us plays in our self-determination, in the well-being of other humans, in the awareness of multiple cultural perspectives, and the health of our ailing planet. Mutu has been experimenting with animation, painting on new surfaces, infusing the space with visceral environmental elements, and implementing the same rigor and commitment to bolder, more complex representations of the African subject and to a deeper investment to subjects usually relegated to the borders and the margins and the silent spots of our shared history.
Mutu is the recipient of the United States Artist Grant (2014), the Brooklyn Museum's Asher B. Durand Artist of the Year Award (2013), and was honored as Deutsche Bank's first Artist of the Year (2010). Mutu recently participated in the Venice Biennale:
All the World’s Futures (2015) and the Dak'Art Biennial, among others. She has exhibited at numerous one-person shows in Europe and North America, and her work is included in various collections of major institutions on those continents.
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