For our first event in our Hiding in Plain Sight programme, we have invited Malaysia-based artist Sharon Chin to speak about her recent projects, with a starting point of her work Creatures on the Move (In the Death of the Night) (2022). This work is a series of photographs of shadow puppets, lit solely by the flare of Hengyuan Refinery in Port Dickson, Malaysia. Chin’s home is located 200m from the fence. This work has taken many forms – as linocuts, placards, and wheatpaste posters. Chin asks: without darkness, how can we dream of the day?

In conversation with Afterall editor Elisa Adami and CSM Art Programme Director Alex Schady, artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza talked about her work in response to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential text Can the Subaltern Speak? for the Two Works series.

(en français) Conversation between Prisca Tankwey, Cedrick Nzolo, Sinzo Aanza, Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse, Judith Clark, Charlotte Delacour, Adeena Mey, and Mick Finch during Afterall’s La Sape and Other Local Imaginaries symposium held in SOAS, University of London.

This talk by Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse, assistant professor at the Catholic University of Congo, will explore how and why digital content is shared and moved into circulation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ribio’s presentation discusses how visual genres such as print cartoons and popular painting now overlap with digital viral videos and memes and highlights the potential for postcolonial political critique offered by online content.

(en français) Photographer and writer Sinzo Aanza walks us through his Improbable Memorial and explores Congolese people as the direct and indirect victims of the worldwide spread of mobile phones, which are made with many materials mined in Congo and whose ubiquitous and indispensable character extends the colonial exploitation of resources and people into the present time.

Designer Cedrick Nzolo takes us through the soul of the Sape. Between art of living, seduction and technique of being. The mvuata-mable is drawn from the CDA (Congo Design Arts) Project which brings together three areas of research and expressiveness: textile and furniture design, fashion and architecture.

Artist and educator Prisca Tankwey presents on the Sape in relation to notions of identity, profile and belonging to classical categories of artistic practices. Too close to performance art, in plastic and conceptual terms, the discipline of the Sape begs a definition or the establishment of new boundaries.

A conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonial artmaking in the 2020s, with artists Rachael Minott and Rosana Paulino. The event will be chaired by writer, researcher and curator Elisa Adami.

A conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonising universities in the 2020s, with Osmundo Pinho, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at Recôncavo da Bahia Federal University, Brazil, and Rahul Rao, Senior Lecturer in Politics at SOAS, University of London. The coversation and Q&A will be chaired by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez, Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

A conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonising museums in the 2020s, with Diego del Valle Ríos, organiser, writer and editor at Terremoto magazine, and curator, architect and researcher Margrarida Nzuzi Waco of The Funambulist magazine, chaired by Afterall Managing Editor Amber Husain.

Join us for a conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonisation in the 2020s with a focus on qestions of gender, with artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and philosopher Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, chaired by researcher Ana González Rueda.

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University, in conversation with artist and Afterall Co-Founding Director Mark Lewis on the ethics of painting and themes of subjectivity in the pedagogical process, with reference to Jean-Siméon Chardin’s captivating 1737 painting, The Young Schoolmistress.

Researcher and curator Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga in conversation with Afterall Managing Editor Adeena Mey on the school as a site of transgression, emotion and radical imagination in Adelita Husni-Bey’s experimental project Postcards From the Desert Island (2010–11).

Artist, critic and Barnard College Professor John Miller discusses the art school in neoliberal crisis and the role of art and the artist in the present, in light of Mike Kelley’s 1995 work of institutional critique, Educational Complex. In conversation Alex Schady, artist and Programme Director for Art at Central Saint Martins.

Yuriko Jackall, Curator of French Paintings at the Wallace Collection, in conversation with artist and CSM Professor of Research Mick Finch on feminism and friendship in Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self Portrait With Two Pupils (1785).

Writer and critic Chris Fite-Wassilak in conversation with artist, filmmaker and CSM professor Graham Ellard on identity and the production of space in Johanna Billing’s 2019 video and performance piece In Purple.

A conversation and Q&A with writer and curator Sylwia Serafinowicz on Elizabeth Catlett‘s 1978 work Students Aspire, made for the campus of Howard University. Serafinowicz will discuss the work and her short essay on its themes co-facilitators Alison Green, art historian, critic, curator and CSM Senior Lecturer, and creative and curator Vanessa Spiridellis, whose research covers Pan-African religions, pirate history and intersectional feminist theory.