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Ancestral Avant-Gardes
organised by Claire Bishop
March 21 @ 9:30 am – 7:00 pm
Image: Grace Ndiritu, Healing the Museum, 2023
This one-day event, organised by art historian and critic Claire Bishop, will offer a range of artistic approaches to ancestrality in contemporary art and performance.
Speakers and participants include: Yinka Esi Graves, Grace Ndiritu, Claire Tancons, and Lucy Wright.
The conference addresses the resurgence of interest in ‘ancestralism’ among performance and visual artists, who hark back to traditional, pre-modern or indigenous forms of collective knowledge, often in the form of ceremonies, rituals, and invocations. The reasons for an artistic interest of healing and ritual are important, and perhaps all too obvious: the global climate crisis, white supremacy’s systematic oppression of Black and indigenous life, and the failures of Western rationalism. These issues need to be articulated and reiterated. At the same time, difficult questions arise: whose ancestors are being invoked, and to what ends? What differences can we observe across historical periods and geographical regions? And how might we develop a critical vocabulary for approaching a body of work that often requires not just participation, but also an openness to the spiritual?
Free – Booking highly recommended
Please note: Due to the amount of interest in this event, tickets are limited to one per person.
The membership of the Art Research Group consists of internationally recognised artists, curators and writers active in developing new forms of research within the expanded field of contemporary visual art. In addition to producing world-leading exhibitions, writing and books, the group’s key focus is on developing collaborative projects that create dynamic new configurations of knowledge located within the subjects identified by its clusters.
For further information please visit: https://artresearch.mmu.ac.uk/