The ninth episode of our ongoing webinar series, When We See Us, was titled “Complexities, Contradictions & Contestations of Race in Africa” and took place online on Tuesday, 29 August 2023.
This parallel discursive program provides theoretical framing for our survey exhibition, When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting. This session complicates both continental and trans-diasporic perceptions of blackness as a racial construct and probes the implications of rigid social identifiers such as citizenship and ethnicity in the establishment of a so-called “African-ness”. Speakers were Dr. Omar Kholeif; Dr. Portia Malatjie; Omar Berrada and Berry Bickle.
In this session, scholars and artists think through constructions of identity, interrogating the socio-historical precedents of what it means to be African and the plurality of experiences and contestations that produce polyvocal understandings of identity among African people.
What are the social and territorial markers of African identity? Who is a person of African descent? And how might we reconstitute African identity outside of settler colonial imaginations?
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Dr Omar Kholeif is an artist and author; a curator and university professor; a broadcaster and platform-starter, who currently serves as Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. The author or co-author of over 40 books, their most recent volume is the critically acclaimed bestseller, Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs published by Phaidon in 2023. Dr Kholeif has curated more than 70 exhibitions, many staged while in senior curatorial positions at museums, biennials, and festivals including, MCA Chicago; FACT Liverpool; Cornerhouse, Manchester; the ICA, the Whitechapel Gallery, and SPACE, London, to name a few.
Dr. Portia Malatjie is a curator and Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art. She is Adjunct Curator of Africa and African Diaspora at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational at Tate Modern (London) and holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths University of London (2020). Malatjie was Associate Lecturer of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths (2017 – 2019), and lecturer in History of Art and Visual Cultures at Rhodes University (2012 – 2013).
Omar Berrada is a writer, curator, and translator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016); La Septième Porte, a posthumous history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020); and Another Room to Live In: 15 Arab Poets in Translation (forthcoming, 2023).
Berry Bickle was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in 1959. Having studied Fine Art at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) Bickle went on to complete a postgraduate degree, majoring in painting. Ever since, she has worked in a diverse range of mediums. These include installation; video; ceramics; contemporary dance and photography. With the latter two, she has worked in urban spaces in order to analyse contemporary histories and the archival as subjects of her work.