African Cosmologies

Curated by renowned London-based curator, Mark Sealy MBE, the FotoFest Biennial2020, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Otherbrings together over 30 artists from around the globe whose works challenge traditional notions of Blackness and transnational histories in relation to concepts of liberty, rights, and representation.

Taking its cues from John Coltrane’s avant-garde jazz oeuvre, wherein formal modernisms of the past are made complex by radical imagination and black-futurity, this presentation of diverse ideas, artistic approaches, and material histories proposes a cosmological exploration of Africa and the contemporary African diaspora; one that defies easy categorization and spatial and temporal boundaries.

In their unique practices, the featured artists turn an eye to social, cultural, and political conditions that inform and influence concepts of representation as theypertain to image production and circulation in Africa and beyond. These artists question the ways in which subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed by the camera, and in the process, reveal legacies of resistance by those who defy traditional ideas of sexual, racial, gender-based, and other marginalized identities.

Mark Sealy writes, “Photography for those locked out of the means of image production becomes an impossible barrier to the right to full and equal human recognition. Especially if existence alone is an act of survival.”

Produced in conjunction with the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition, the African Cosmologiesbook will feature essays by leading scholars in the fields of contemporary art, photography, and cultural studies. Images of installations, photography, film, and video works by artists will highlight the range of interdisciplinary approaches that are represented in the Biennial exhibition.