DECOLONISATION IN THE 2020s

This symposium was a collaboration with Museu de Arte de São Paulo, UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute and Goldsmiths Department of Visual Cultures. Jumping off from our pilot ArtSchool 2020 project, this programme invited various contributors to contribute a short text (1,500 words) on a given theme, and to join a subsequent live video call to discuss it.

Essays

Decolonial Artmaking in the 2020s

Artist, curator, and researcher Rachael Minott thinks through decolonial views on artmaking, gathering the thoughts of Audre Lorde and her own personal experiences.

Notes on Reading Artworks by Black Artists in the Brazilian Context

Arist and educator Rosana Paulino writes about the ways in which Black artists are written about and studied in Brazil, and how these modalities can be challenged.

[Description: Black and white photograph of people looking out of a window]
Decolonisation’s Conservative Enemies and Liberal Friends

In this essay, Senior Lecturer in Politics at SOAS Rahul Rao reflects on the UK’s Conservative response to Black History Month.

[Description: Valeska Soares, Duplaface (Branco de titânio), 2017. Oil and cutout on existing oil portrait, 71 x 56cm. Courtesy MASP]
Anti-Blackness and Representation: Decolonising the Library at the Peripheral University

Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at Recôncavo da Bahia Federal University Osmundo Pinho reflects on the Brazilian writers Monteiro Lobato and Carolina Maria de Jesus, thinking through representation and Blackness.

Notes on Publishing: Imagination and limitation in the 2020s

Curator, architect, and researcher Margarida Waco writes about the publishing industry in 2020, its potentials, and pitfalls.

Fire to the Factories of Whiteness!

In this text, cultural organiser and writer Diego del Valle Rios writes about Mexico City’s relationship with decoloniality as the ‘Cultural Capital of America,’ its museum’s collections, and ways to dismantle the city’s capitalist hydra.

To Intervene in the Museum or to Dynamite it? Some reflections on art and decoloniality

Philosopher Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso writes about broadening our understandings on art as intertwined with daily life and liberation.

[Description: Six small wooden bowls lined up on a right diagonal angle leading from foreground to the white background, each with spun fabric on them. Near the base of the rods are threaded wooden bearings to hold the fabric in place.]
‘Universal Education’ in Art and its Painful Divisions

Artist, writer, and musician Elvira Espejo Ayca takes readers through the Andean language, unpacking art’s necessary ties to praxis and the act of doing.

Three Attempts to Decolonise the South

In this essay, Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires Victoria Noorthoorn details three attempts by the museum to decolonise during a moment of global crisis.

Events

[Description: Photo of Rachael Minott and Rosana Paulino]
Decolonial Artmaking

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.

Decolonising Publishing

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.

[Description: Danielle Brathewaite-Shirley (left), and Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso (right).]
Gender and Decolonisation

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.

[Description: Victoria Noorthoorn (on the left), and Elvira Espejo Ayca (on the right).]
Decolonising the Museum

A conversation on the stakes, problematics and possibilities of decolonising museums in the 2020s, with Victoria Noorthoorn, Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, and Bolivian artist, writer and musician Elvira Espejo Ayca, chaired by Amanda Carneiro, Curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.

References