Dates:
20 Nov 2023 - 7 Dec 2023
Location:
iniva, 16 John Islip St, London SW1P 4JU
Project:
As part of our Shifting the Centre: Anticolonial Ways of Seeing exhibition, ICF and iniva invite you to two Reading Group sessions and a special screening and Q&A of Edwards Said’s the Idea of Empire (1993) at the Stuart Hall Library.
These sessions aim to draw connections between what we read and our immediate political reality to think through how anticolonial ways of seeing can be applied in practice.
Reading Group – Monday 20 & Friday 24 November, 5:30-7:30pm
ICF and iniva invite you to bring in a single text, poem, quote, artwork, or excerpt which you associate with Anticolonial Ways of Seeing to share and discuss over two open and informal group discussions. If you would prefer not to bring your own text, we have included links below to texts for attendees to help ground the discussion, and/or we encourage you to make use of the texts on display in the exhibition.
We hope the session can generate collective consideration of the ways in which critical texts can act as important analytical tools for addressing urgent political realities, such as the colonial systems impacting peoples living in places like Palestine and the Congo, through historical readings of revolutions like the ones that took place in Haiti and Grenada.
If you plan to bring your own texts, please email info@internationalcuratorsforum.org with the title so that it can potentially be added to the Stuart Hall Library’s collection.
This is an in-person event with limited spaces and registration is essential.
Supplementary Reading:
Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report by Audre Lorde (1984)
Ronald Reagan Speech justifying US invasion of Lebanon and Grenada (1983)
All the Devils Are Here’ – How the Visual History of the Haitian Revolution Misrepresents Black Suffering and Death by Marlene L. Daut (2020)
Screening and Q&A – Thursday 7 December, 5:30-7:30pm
Join ICF and iniva at the Stuart Hall Library for a special screening of Edward Said’s ‘The Idea of Empire’ (1993), of which an excerpt is being shown in the exhibition. The film will play from 6pm-7pm then we will have time for a 30-minute discussion at the end.
We will consider how Edward Said’s work can help us make sense of Empire’s continuation and its contemporary articulations.
This is an in-person event with limited spaces and registration is essential, but we will be live streaming the film and the Q&A.
________
Anticolonial Ways of Seeing is the second iteration of our Shifting the Centre project. The exhibition will place publications from the Stuart Hall Library into dialogue with a variety of materials found in iniva’s archive collection to build a series of constellations in the Stuart Hall Library space.
Anticolonialism can be understood as a tradition of thought and action; a transnational counter-politics enacted by peoples resisting the material conditions, structural legacies and ideologies that normalise empire.
The exhibition considers the concept of ‘anticolonialism’ as a framework that allows clear links to be drawn between racialisation and capitalism, between past and present-day injustices, and local and global political struggles. The exhibition asks: is a contemporary anticolonial visual language possible? What are its concerns, reference points, and principles? What kinds of demands can it articulate? What sort of education can it provide? What histories does it draw from?
Shifting the Centre is International Curators Forum’s archival activation project dedicated to excavating the radical observations, emancipatory dreams, and revolutionary practices of anticolonial thinkers to develop counter approaches by asking: what kinds of ideas emerge when those resisting dominant forces are the protagonists of world history?
The project locates connections between seemingly unrelated events, people, issues and objects as a way of rejecting a single vantage point from which to understand, tell and mobilise histories. Ultimately, it seeks to widen what dominant forces attempt to narrow: our vision, imagination, and the political possibilities available to us.
Following on from the Shifting the Centre: Grenada as Reference exhibition at Black Cultural Archives, Anticolonial Ways of Seeing is an invitation to consider the relationship between politics and aesthetics, between anticolonialism – as a tradition of thought and action – and the visual arts.
Shifting the Centre forms part of ICF’s multi-season Systems Reclaimed Project supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
Project:
As part of our Shifting the Centre: Anticolonial Ways of Seeing exhibition, ICF and iniva invite you to two Reading Group sessions and a special screening and Q&A of Edwards Said’s the Idea of Empire (1993) at the Stuart Hall Library.
These sessions aim to draw connections between what we read and our immediate political reality to think through how anticolonial ways of seeing can be applied in practice.
Reading Group – Monday 20 & Friday 24 November, 5:30-7:30pm
ICF and iniva invite you to bring in a single text, poem, quote, artwork, or excerpt which you associate with Anticolonial Ways of Seeing to share and discuss over two open and informal group discussions. If you would prefer not to bring your own text, we have included links below to texts for attendees to help ground the discussion, and/or we encourage you to make use of the texts on display in the exhibition.
We hope the session can generate collective consideration of the ways in which critical texts can act as important analytical tools for addressing urgent political realities, such as the colonial systems impacting peoples living in places like Palestine and the Congo, through historical readings of revolutions like the ones that took place in Haiti and Grenada.
If you plan to bring your own texts, please email info@internationalcuratorsforum.org with the title so that it can potentially be added to the Stuart Hall Library’s collection.
This is an in-person event with limited spaces and registration is essential.
Supplementary Reading:
Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report by Audre Lorde (1984)
Ronald Reagan Speech justifying US invasion of Lebanon and Grenada (1983)
All the Devils Are Here’ – How the Visual History of the Haitian Revolution Misrepresents Black Suffering and Death by Marlene L. Daut (2020)
Screening and Q&A – Thursday 7 December, 5:30-7:30pm
Join ICF and iniva at the Stuart Hall Library for a special screening of Edward Said’s ‘The Idea of Empire’ (1993), of which an excerpt is being shown in the exhibition. The film will play from 6pm-7pm then we will have time for a 30-minute discussion at the end.
We will consider how Edward Said’s work can help us make sense of Empire’s continuation and its contemporary articulations.
This is an in-person event with limited spaces and registration is essential, but we will be live streaming the film and the Q&A.
________
Anticolonial Ways of Seeing is the second iteration of our Shifting the Centre project. The exhibition will place publications from the Stuart Hall Library into dialogue with a variety of materials found in iniva’s archive collection to build a series of constellations in the Stuart Hall Library space.
Anticolonialism can be understood as a tradition of thought and action; a transnational counter-politics enacted by peoples resisting the material conditions, structural legacies and ideologies that normalise empire.
The exhibition considers the concept of ‘anticolonialism’ as a framework that allows clear links to be drawn between racialisation and capitalism, between past and present-day injustices, and local and global political struggles. The exhibition asks: is a contemporary anticolonial visual language possible? What are its concerns, reference points, and principles? What kinds of demands can it articulate? What sort of education can it provide? What histories does it draw from?
Shifting the Centre is International Curators Forum’s archival activation project dedicated to excavating the radical observations, emancipatory dreams, and revolutionary practices of anticolonial thinkers to develop counter approaches by asking: what kinds of ideas emerge when those resisting dominant forces are the protagonists of world history?
The project locates connections between seemingly unrelated events, people, issues and objects as a way of rejecting a single vantage point from which to understand, tell and mobilise histories. Ultimately, it seeks to widen what dominant forces attempt to narrow: our vision, imagination, and the political possibilities available to us.
Following on from the Shifting the Centre: Grenada as Reference exhibition at Black Cultural Archives, Anticolonial Ways of Seeing is an invitation to consider the relationship between politics and aesthetics, between anticolonialism – as a tradition of thought and action – and the visual arts.
Shifting the Centre forms part of ICF’s multi-season Systems Reclaimed Project supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
Dates:
20 Nov 2023 - 7 Dec 2023
Location:
iniva, 16 John Islip St, London SW1P 4JU
