Blue Skies: Elijah Maja & Ibrahim Cissé with Dominique White & Adam Farah - Sanguine August
Dates:
28 Jul 2020
People:
Location:
Online
Project:
Elijah Maja & Ibrahim Cissé are artists and curators based in the UK and France, respectively. For this conversation they invited guests Dominique White & Adam Farah – both artists – to participate in an open ended conversation that threaded provocations and questions together to explore current mind-states, strategies and thoughts on care and collectivity, alongside their individual practices.
Ibrahim Cissé is a creative whose work revolves mainly around questions of social welfare. Cissé’s thinking is informed by his own living experience in Europe and his relation to the African Diaspora. It helps him to articulate and negotiate the intersectional narratives through filmmaking and creative writing. Cissé’s focus is geared towards education and publishing. These tools or practices are central to understanding Cissé’s intentions and methodologies. In 2020, Cissé works on the development of Lost in Time Publishing a platform to experiment on the potential for publishing and archiving processes to address the effects of colonisation in contemporary colonial contexts.
Elijah Maja is an artist and researcher from London. Working across methods of practice that actively engage audio-visual provocations into notions of ritual, process and their lineage as intangible spaces for activation.
Adam Farah is an artist and composer born-n-raised in London and is a Capricorn Sun, Cancer Rising, Leo Moon. They also practise under and within the name free.yard – an ongoing situational and unstable project set up to engage with and merge curatorial, research, artistic and equitable communal practices; with a focus on the ever-expansive and nuanced creative endeavours and potentials that emerge from endz. free.yard casts a side-eye onto the oppressive and supremacist structures upheld within the complacent and performative liberal bubbles of the artworld/s, and in the long term desires to create collaborative moments for artists to connect, manifest and exhale under such weight.
Dominique White weaves together the theories of Black Subjectivity, Afro-pessimism and Hydrarchy with the nautical myths of Black Diaspora into a term she defines as the Shipwreck(ed); a reflexive verb and state of being. Her sculptures demonstrate how Black life could extend beyond its own subjective limits and act as beacons or vessels of an ignored civilisation defined as the Stateless; a realm in which the past, present and future have converged into a Black Future. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021); the Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale in San Marino (2021); Possédé·e·s at Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier (2020); Fugitive of the State(less) at VEDA Firenze (2019); Abandon(ed) Vessel at KevinSpace, Vienna (2019); and Boundary + Gesture at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2019). White was awarded the Roger Pailhas Prize (FR) in 2019 in conjunction with her solo presentation with VEDA Firenze and has received awards from artangel (UK) and the Henry Moore Foundation (UK) in 2020. White was in residency at Sagrada Mercancía (CL) and at Triangle France (FR) in 2020.
Images courtesy Elijah Maja.
People:
Project:
Elijah Maja & Ibrahim Cissé are artists and curators based in the UK and France, respectively. For this conversation they invited guests Dominique White & Adam Farah – both artists – to participate in an open ended conversation that threaded provocations and questions together to explore current mind-states, strategies and thoughts on care and collectivity, alongside their individual practices.
Ibrahim Cissé is a creative whose work revolves mainly around questions of social welfare. Cissé’s thinking is informed by his own living experience in Europe and his relation to the African Diaspora. It helps him to articulate and negotiate the intersectional narratives through filmmaking and creative writing. Cissé’s focus is geared towards education and publishing. These tools or practices are central to understanding Cissé’s intentions and methodologies. In 2020, Cissé works on the development of Lost in Time Publishing a platform to experiment on the potential for publishing and archiving processes to address the effects of colonisation in contemporary colonial contexts.
Elijah Maja is an artist and researcher from London. Working across methods of practice that actively engage audio-visual provocations into notions of ritual, process and their lineage as intangible spaces for activation.
Adam Farah is an artist and composer born-n-raised in London and is a Capricorn Sun, Cancer Rising, Leo Moon. They also practise under and within the name free.yard – an ongoing situational and unstable project set up to engage with and merge curatorial, research, artistic and equitable communal practices; with a focus on the ever-expansive and nuanced creative endeavours and potentials that emerge from endz. free.yard casts a side-eye onto the oppressive and supremacist structures upheld within the complacent and performative liberal bubbles of the artworld/s, and in the long term desires to create collaborative moments for artists to connect, manifest and exhale under such weight.
Dominique White weaves together the theories of Black Subjectivity, Afro-pessimism and Hydrarchy with the nautical myths of Black Diaspora into a term she defines as the Shipwreck(ed); a reflexive verb and state of being. Her sculptures demonstrate how Black life could extend beyond its own subjective limits and act as beacons or vessels of an ignored civilisation defined as the Stateless; a realm in which the past, present and future have converged into a Black Future. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021); the Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale in San Marino (2021); Possédé·e·s at Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier (2020); Fugitive of the State(less) at VEDA Firenze (2019); Abandon(ed) Vessel at KevinSpace, Vienna (2019); and Boundary + Gesture at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2019). White was awarded the Roger Pailhas Prize (FR) in 2019 in conjunction with her solo presentation with VEDA Firenze and has received awards from artangel (UK) and the Henry Moore Foundation (UK) in 2020. White was in residency at Sagrada Mercancía (CL) and at Triangle France (FR) in 2020.
Images courtesy Elijah Maja.
Dates:
28 Jul 2020
Location:
Online