Black Bodies

The Body Concepts series is based on the principle of transdisciplinary encounters. The session begins with a lecture by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, followed by a dialogue with artist Isabel Lewis.

LECTURE BY ANNA ARABINDAN-KESSON: Artists are materializing new methods for approaching, and imagining, the entangled histories of colonialism. This talk Return as Method. Material Visions and Reparative Futures in the Shadow of the Plantation is drawing on my book “Black Bodies, White Gold” and new research towards colonial visual cultures, considers several artists’ methods of retracing the networks of these histories, drawing out the detournements that can emerge from this process, and using this re-routing to imagine new forms of relation.

Following their lead and the work of Black feminist practitioners, my talk will center a transhistorical approach that explores the materiality of movement embedded in a range of art objects (textiles, quilts, images) and consider if, and how, these processes might be understood as reparative.

Link for livestream. Free admission. In English.

ANNA ARABINDAN-KESSON is an Associate professor of Black Diasporic art at Princeton University. She practiced as a Registered Nurse before entering academia. Her prizewinning monograph is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). Along with Professor Mia Bagneris she is completing a book on 19th century Black Diaspora artists, and a monograph on the intersection of art and medicine in plantation imagery called Empire States of Mind with Duke University Press. She was elected to membership of the American Antiquarian Society in 20203, held the 2022 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. She directs the research hub Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism. www.artandcolonialmedicine.com

Trained in dance, philosophy, and literary criticism, artist ISABEL LEWIS (born 1981 in Santo Domingo, DR) creates works that address the entire human sensorium in critical response to the dominance of contemporary visual culture. Lewis employs an expanded sense of the choreographic; she generates affective bodily experiences in multiple formats including performances, publications, workshops, and socio-choreographic and spatial situations she calls “hosted occasions.” Her works have been presented internationally in biennials and solo exhibitions as well as in music, theater, and dance and club contexts. Lewis is a professor at the Fine Art Academy (HGB), Leipzig, leading the Class for Performative Arts since 2021.

Image: View of Lucky Valley Estate Buildings, Clarendon, 1810, Watercolour

Veranstaltungsort: Uferstudios | Studio 11 | Uferstr. 23 | 13357Berlin

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