Morocco’s ‘My Name Is Not Negro’ Campaign

MANIFEST !

NGUVA by WANGECHI MUTU (2014)

For her new exhibition Nguva na Nyoka (Sirens and Serpents)at London’s Victoria Miro gallery, Mutu looked to mythologies from Africa and the Arab world, exploring the troubling spirit of mermaids and the abyssal mystery of the sea, where sailors are seduced and annihilated. The accompanying film Nguva, previewed here, opens with an unsettling scream, moving to ghostly images of veiled women on a sandy shore. The artist appears as a hysterical beast whose menacing force slowly dissipates. Through this magical metamorphosis, Mutu creates a surreal landscape between life and death, reality and dreams, the female body transforming into site of geo-political and sexual violence.”

Watch the film in full 

The Sirens, 1956, by Haitian artist Rigaud Benoit

Frances Bodomo | Writer/Director

Frances Bodomo is a Ghanaian filmmaker who grew up in Ghana, Norway, California, and Hong Kong before moving to New York City to study film at Columbia University (BA) and the Tisch School of the Arts (MFA). Her goal is to make conceptually strong films that bring fresh African images to the international forefront. 

Her first short film, Boneshaker (starring Oscar-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis), premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and played at over 20 film festivals including Telluride, SXSW, LA Film Fest, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Her latest short film, Afronauts (recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Production Grant & Spike Lee Fellowship), will premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. She is developing the feature version of the film. 

She was most recently accepted into the 2014 Berlin Talents program. @tobogganeer

Leikeli47: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Architecture of Independence - African Modernism

Vitra Design Museum Gallery

"When many countries in Central and Sub-Saharan Africa gained their independence in the 1960s, experimental and futuristic architecture became a principal means by which the young nations expressed their national identities. The exhibition in the Vitra Design Museum Gallery is one of the first presentations of this remarkable period of more recent architectural history. This exhibition was researched and curated by architect and author Manuel Herz, with a substantial contribution by photographer Iwan Baan. The exhibition documents more than 80 buildings in five countries; Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, Ghana and Senegal. The often heroic and daring designs of parliament buildings, central banks, stadiums, conference centers, universities and independence memorials mirror the forward-looking spirit that was dominant in these countries at the time. However, this architecture also represents the difficulties, contradictions and dilemmas that the young nations experienced in their independence process, as building designs and architects were often imported from foreign countries, if not from one of the former colonial powers.”

Glenn Ligon, Give us a Poem (Palindrome #2), 2007

“Glenn Ligon made this neon piece […] in 2007, and I saw it a little while back on the wall of the Studio Museum in Harlem, where it’s part of the permanent collection. The work is built around an incident that occurred at Harvard in 1975, when Muhammad Ali had just finished a speech and a student in the audience asked him to improvise a poem: ‘Me/We’ was the pithy verse Ali offered. Even then, at the height of the Black Power movement, it was an intriguingly opaque statement that could have been read as a gesture of solidarity between the black boxer and his white audience, or as an underlining of their difference. In Ligon’s work, the two words become a visual palindrome, of sorts – symmetrical top and bottom – and alternate being lit (white) and unlit (black), which just increases the tension inherent in them. In 2014, in a museum in Harlem, it strikes me that the tension is between the artist and the audience he addresses – with the issue of race still there, but now wrapped up in larger issues of aesthetic communities and the class, and color, they imply." Blake Gopnik, The Daily Pic

THE SWEET FLYPAPER OF LIFE

Roy Decarava & Langston Hughes, 1955

Paris, 18 octobre 2013, 13.00, les lycéens sont dans la rue pour protester contre la stratégie du gouvernement qui consiste à spectaculariser les reconduites à la frontière des immigrés continuant ainsi fragiliser les plus vulnérables.

New Joburg: another @ikirejones collaboration:: www.ikirejones.com GET FRESH. #art #design #fashion #style #menswear