Events

Co-sponsored Event

March 26 - April 10, 2022

LIVING WITH GHOSTS Exhibition curated by Kojo Abudu

https://wallach.columbia.edu/exhibitions/living-ghosts

Living with Ghosts initiates an exploration into the ways the unresolved traumas of Africa’s colonial past and its unfulfilled project of decolonisation continue to haunt its present. The exhibition critically addresses the ghosts, spirits, and phantoms that abound in the modern calamities of African postcolonial history. These are the apparitions, the unseen but deeply felt forces – thus at once visible and invisible, material and immaterial – that continually disturb individual and collective relations within the African postcolony and throughout its diaspora, leaving behind melancholic traces in subjectivities, landscapes, architecture, and archival materials. Conceiving of this notion of “hauntology” along several axes, from the spatial and the temporal, to the psychological and the spiritual, Living with Ghosts centres contemporary art practice in considerations of the spectral given the phenomenon’s crucial yet ambiguous relation to categories of presence and absence.
Living with Ghosts returns to Jacques Derrida’s provocation in his text, Specters of Marx – one that inspires this exhibition’s title – on how we might live with these ghosts, rather than eradicate them. Moving beyond the stultification of trauma, this exhibition frames haunting (and its attendant melancholic affects) as that which impels us to “to live otherwise and better.” This is to say that the specter, which bears the affective weight of arrested possibilities and unfulfilled promises, leads us to demand and bring about alternative and more just African futures.
Comprising three overlapping acts, including an intimate gallery display, an art-film screening program, and a live virtual lecture series, Living With Ghosts invites us to feed and commune with the ghosts conjured by a host of artists and thinkers including John Akomfrah, Kader Attia, Zarina Bhimji, Filipa César, T.J. Demos, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Onyeka Igwe, Bouchra Khalili, Serubiri Moses, Abraham Oghobase and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa.

For all information visit https://wallach.columbia.edu/exhibitions/living-ghosts

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION

GALLERY
Rotimi Fani-Kayode
Bouchra Khalili
Abraham Oghobase

SCREENING, APRIL 2, 2022

John Akomfrah
Kader Attia
Zarina Bhimji
Filipa César
Onyeka Igwe
Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa

LECTURES

APRIL 4, 2022; 6:30 PM
T.J. Demos
Return to the Postcolony: Spectrality in the 21st Century

APRIL 6, 2022; 6:30 PM
Serubiri Moses
The Subjunctive Form(s) of Rotimi Fani-Kayode

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WALLACH TALKS | MODA CURATES 2022: EXHIBITION TALKS
Saturday, April 09, 2022, 1:30PM - 2:30PM

MODA Curates 2022 fellows Kojo Abudu and Emily Small lead short talks about their respective exhibitions Living with Ghosts and A.K. Burns’ Negative Space: Prepositions of the Future.

Kojo Abudu is a critic and curator based between London, Lagos, and New York. His writings and exhibitions focus on critical art and aesthetic practices from the Global South, particularly Africa and its diaspora, which respond to the world-historical conditions produced by colonial modernity. His forthcoming exhibition, Traces of Ecstasy, will open as part of the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial in 2023.
Emily Small is an American scholar and emerging curator from Northern California whose interests focus on queer and feminist methodologies in contemporary craft, performance, and video. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 where she studied the historical intersections between performance art, textiles, and social activism.
Please note that this is an in-person event. The talks will begin at the entrance to the Wallach Art Gallery on the 6th floor. The talks are included with visitor registration. https://bit.ly/3LrsVYU

MODA Curates is an annual opportunity offered by The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies Program for outstanding curatorial proposals related to students’ theses.