African Cosmologies: Redux Opening Reception
Friday, September 23 | 6:30–9PM
The Alta Arts
5412 Ashbrook Dr, Houston, TX 77081
Join us Friday, September 23 from 6:30–9PM in celebration of the FotoFest Biennial 2022 exhibition African Cosmologies: Redux featuring artists Sammy Baloji and Mónica de Miranda at The Alta Arts. Meet the organizers behind the exhibition while enjoying refreshments and viewing the works. African Cosmologies: Redux is an adaptation of the postponed FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, featuring artists included in the original iteration of that exhibition and complemented by a series of programs. This event is free and open to the public. Register for free admission tickets by following the link below.
About African Cosmologies: Redux
African Cosmologies: Redux is an adaptation of the postponed FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, featuring artists included in the original iteration of that exhibition and complemented by a series of programs.
Curated by Mark Sealy, Director of the renowned London-based photographic art institution Autograph ABP, African Cosmologies: Redux is a large-scale group exhibition that examines the complex relationships between contemporary life in Africa, the African diaspora, and global histories of colonialism, photography, and rights and representation. The exhibition considers the history of photography as one closely tied to a colonial project and Western image production, highlighting artists who confront and challenge this shortsighted, albeit canonized lineage.
Taking its cues from John Coltrane’s avant-garde jazz oeuvre, wherein formal modernisms of the past are made complex by radical imagination and black- futurity, this presentation of diverse ideas, artistic approaches, and material histories proposes a “cosmological exploration” of Africa and the African diaspora— one that defies easy categorization and spatial and temporal boundaries. Succinctly, it explores the very notions of Africa and Africanness beyond traditional geographic and historical lines.
The artists featured in African Cosmologies: Redux turn an eye to social, cultural, and political conditions that inform and influence concepts of representation as they pertain to image production and circulation within Africa and beyond. These artists question the ways in which subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed by the camera, and in the process, reveal legacies of resistance by those who defy traditional ideas of sexual, racial, gender-based, and other marginalized identities.
African Cosmologies: Redux is presented in venues city-wide including at Spring Street Studios at Sawyer Yards, The Alta Arts, the Houston Museum of African American Culture, and the Menil Collection.
This exhibition is accompanied by a Biennial Book, co-published by FotoFest Inc. and Schilt Publishing, and features texts by curator Mark Sealy and leading voices in literature, theory, and visual art as well as beautiful images of works by the exhibition artists. The Biennial Book can be purchased at Silver Street Studios, Whitehall Houston Hotel, and online.
FotoFest Biennial 2022 Media Sponsor:
Image: Mónica de Miranda, Untitled, From the series City-Scapes, 2017. Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery.
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