AFROGALACTICA | Performance | Lecture with video projection
Co-presented by Images Festival and The Power Plant. With the generous support of TD Bank Group, Le Labo, and Ryerson Image Centre.
As a one-night-only performance by Paris-based KAPWANI KIWANGA, AFROGALACTICA: A brief history of the future features a live reading with video projection in which Kiwanga takes on the role of a fictional anthropologist to speculate on the future, investigating Afrofuturism as a means to examine the past from an African or African diasporic subjectivity.
Friday April 21, 2017 at 9 PM – 10 PM
Location: Innis Town Hall, University of Toronto, 2 avenue Sussex, Toronto, ON, M5S 1J5
Price : $15 general admission / $10 students, seniors, underemployed
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Kapwani Kiwanga, Artist
Kiwanga’s work often grapples with Afrofuturism, anti-colonial struggle, collective memory, belief systems, and different cultural ways of approaching the supernatural. In recent projects, the artist revisits her earlier academic studies of anthropology and comparative religion, often assuming the role of a researcher. Her methods include assembling narratives and scientific protocols in order to establish alternative ways to observe culture and its evolving characteristics. Her sources range from academic papers and scientific reports to mythologies and poetry, which she skillfully blends with popular culture— both fact and fiction, past and present—to project into the future. Kiwanga undermines the authority of Western academia and hegemonic discourses, while enabling us to reflect upon alternative histories and visualize future possibilities.
In her recent work Kapwani Kiwanga revisits her earlier training in social sciences and elaborates research projects in which she occupies the rola of a researcher. Her methodology include fashioning systems and establishing protocols as in scientific experimentation to delineate lenses through which one can observe culture and its characteristic propensity toward mutation.
Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religions at McGill University. She was an artist in residence at: l’École National Supérieure de Beaux-Arts, Paris (France); Le Fresnoy: National Cotemporary Art Studio (France), and MU Foundation, Eindhoven (Netherlands).
An award winning filmmaker, her documentary work has been nominated for two BAFTA’s. She has exhibited internationally including at: Centre Georges Pompidou (France), Glasgow Centre of Contemporary Art (U.K.), Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo Almeria (Spain), Kassel Documentary Film Festival (Allemagne), Kaleidoscope Arena Rome (Italie) et à Paris Photo (France).