The Imagined New is an interdisciplinary platform for critical exchange and research around African and African diasporic art practices as they relate to questions of history, archive and the alternative imagination(s) of the Radical Black Tradition.
Collaboratively presented by the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, and the Brown Arts Initiative..
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How do we engender a polyvocal, nuanced, elastic language of Blackness? What might its grammars be? Is it fungibility? Disposability? Precarity? How do we think of Blackness as generative, as wavered, as fractal? What would this arsenal or treasure trove of concepts, forms, assemblages and modes of practice look like? How do we nurture these radical imaginaries?
Saidiya Hartman / Closing reflections, The Imagined New Vol I
In African and African Diasporic art practices we see the possibility of an alternative set of archives, in which histories and possible futures are reconceived, embodied and performed as radical claims to Black life.
In May 2019 VIAD and the CSSJ gathered a group of thirty scholars, artists, curators and cultural workers from South Africa, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Brazil, the United States and the Caribbean, for volume I of The Imagined New / Working through alternative archives project. Proposed in the conversations, interventions, performances, incantations and, yes, meals that followed was a radical rethinking of the archive – or rather, of alternative archives, in relation to Art, History & the African Diaspora. Inflected by the radical Black imagination implied in the overarching idea of The Imagined New (and its corollary, What happens when History is a catastrophe?), key points of discussion centred around Black memory as performing archives of the imagined new; enactments of refusal and creative strategies for living otherwise; and the necessary rethinking of African and Afrodiasporic sacral art practices. Convened by CSSJ Director and VIAD Visiting Professor and Curator Anthony Bogues, this trans-disciplinary programme was at different points facilitated by Surafel Wondimu Abebe, Geri Augusto, Tina Campt, Khwezi Gule, Saidiya Hartman and Alberta Whittle.
Vol I of a 3-part Imagined New publication series is currently in production. Edited by Surafel Wondimu Abebe, Anthony Bogues, Leora Farber and Zamansele Nsele, and to be published as an interactive e-book, the volume will include textual and multimedia contributions by Surafel Wondimu Abebe, Geri Augusto, Nicola Cloete, Felicia Denaud, Jabulani Dhlamini, Erica Moiyah Jame,s Renée Mussai, Zamansele Nsele, Cláudia Rocha, Huda Tayob, François Vergés and Alberta Whittle, as well as a transcribed panel discussion convened by Johannesburg Art Gallery Chief Curator Khwezi Gule, which included leading black curators from art museum contexts in South Africa, Brazil and US.
If the project of history is one of silence, of the systematic erasure and disappearance of those considered peripheral to the optic fantasy and logo-centrism of ‘civilization’ (read whiteness), then how might the sonic present a uniquely enabling modality for thinking, feeling and performing a different historical imagination?
If the fantasy of ‘civilization’ is sustained by imagining and reimagining relationships with the environment, memory and a set of inherent rules which imbricate Whiteness with the sacred, then how does the profane (read Blackness) undertake this task of historical (re)imagination? How do those that face down the catastrophe of history rebuild in its aftermath(s)?
Central to this rebuilding is a certain conception of Heritage and Heresy. Here, heritage is not, intended as a kind of singular cultural, national or continental identity but as praxis or rather, a set of praxes that operate both in relation to and against the logo-centrism of ‘civilization.’ As an expression, Blackness challenges the stability of the sacred-profane dialectic. In so doing, heresy reveals the paradox of the orthodox and enacts the possibility of choice.
Through this heritage of praxis, the ordinary crossfades into the extraordinary and the dissolution of the boundary is itself heretical. The words that comprise The Souls of Black Folk are meaningless without the title’s referent black folk. If logo-centrism posits the word as sacred, these articulations of Blackness (which look beyond the word) become heresy, enacted.
To be clear, the Black Sonic then is not about sound or sonics as content or category, as the cultural ‘by-product’ of the black experience, but sound and sonics as a heritage of heretical praxis; as so many ways of being and becoming. By Black Sonic we thus mean (or rather, call into play) the multiple soundings, dissonances, resonances, rhythmic patterns and diasporic relays that have historically animated and continue to enunciate Black life and create new types of archives. Archives that both store and broadcast the Black Sonic.
Through these broadcasts, the quietude of slavery and colonialism are disturbed across historical time. Similarly, these broadcasts traverse geographical space and amplify the trans-nationality of Black Lives Matter. Taken together, the Black Sonic underscores the dynamic range of Fred Moten’s “black phonic substance” and the ways in which black, brown, femme and queer people from across the African diaspora embody and make shareable its many cadences.
As volume II of The Imagined New / Working through alternative archives, the Black Sonic presents a digital exhibition that will explore the Black Sonic and the heritage of heretical praxis. These praxes are the conditions for new historical imagination(s) across time and space.
Programme and artists details to be announced shortly…
Following the online programme, an interactive e-book featuring contributions from artists, curators and DJ scholars included in the programme will be published with Iwalewa Books, as Vol II of a 3-part Imagined New publication series.
Image credit
DJ Lynnée Denise’s Electric Ring Shout
Rashaad Newsome (b. 1979, New Orleans) blends several practices in his work, including collage, sculpture, film, photography, music, computer programming, software engineering, community organizing, and performance, to create an altogether new field. Using the diasporic traditions of improvisation, he pulls from the world of advertising, the internet, Art History, Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that walks the tightrope between social practice, abstraction, and intersectionality. Collage acts as a conceptual and technical method to construct a new cultural framework of power that does not find the oppression of others necessary. Newsome’s work celebrates Black contributions to the art canon and creates innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media.
Newsome lives and works between Brooklyn, New York City, and Oakland, California. He received a BFA in Art History at Tulane University in 2001. In 2004, he received a certificate of study in Digital Post Production from Film/Video Arts Inc. (NYC). In 2005 he studied MAX/MSP Programming at Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center (NYC). He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions, and festivals throughout the world, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), The Whitney Museum (NYC), Brooklyn Museum (NYC), MoMAPS1 (NYC), SFMOMA (CA), New Orleans Museum of Art (LA), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), and MUSA (Vienna). Newsome’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC), Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (NYC), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), The Oakland Museum of California (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LA), McNay Art Museum (TX), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VA), The Chazen Museum of Art (WI), National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC) and The New Britain Museum of American Art (CT). In 2010 he participated in the Whitney Biennial (NYC), and in 2011 Greater New York at MoMAPS1 (NYC).
His many honors and awards for his work include a 2021 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship, 2020/2022 Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence artist residency, 2020 Eyebeam Rapid Response Fellowship, a 2019 LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant, a 2019 BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship, a 2018 William Penn Foundation Grant, the 2018/2019 Live Feed Creative Residency at New York Live Arts, a 2017/2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2017 Rush Arts Gold Rush Award, the 2016 Artist-in-Residence at the Tamarind Institute, NM, the 2014 Headlands Center for the Arts Visiting Artist Residency, a 2011 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, a 2010 Urban Artist Initiative Individual Artist Grant, and a 2009 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant.