FotoFest2020OpeningNight_120

African Cosmologies: Redux Curatorial Tour

Wednesday, October 5 | 6PM

Spring Street Studios

1824 Spring St, Houston, TX 77007

Join Curator Mark Sealy for a tour through the African Cosmologies: Redux exhibition at Spring Street Studios. This exhibition 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.

African Cosmologies: Redux 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.

This program is free and open to the public. For information about all FotoFest Biennial 2022 public programs visit fotofest.org/programs.

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About African Cosmologies: Redux

The FotoFest Biennial 2022 central exhibition, If I Had a Hammer, considers the ways artists utilize images to unpack the ideological underpinnings that inspire collective cultural movements around the globe. Together, the twenty-three included artists propose alternative techniques of seeing and engaging with the world, working with both conventional and new media to shed light on the systems that encourage social theories and political imaginaries to become dogma at the click of a shutter or tap of a button.

If I Had a Hammer explores both artistic and activist interventions into the structures of contemporary image-production, calling attention to how these structures both reflect and inform our perception of the world, historical narratives, and the agency to engage in collective cultural discourse. The exhibition proposes that the systems and structures that support ideological formation such as historical archives, digital media networks, sociopolitical organizing campaigns, and infrastructural and territorial developments, are inextricably linked to the history and development of photography and image technology. Through disparate approaches, the artists in If I Had a Hammer offer strategies to resist and replace legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and systemic violence by exploiting the language and material of image-production and media circulation. In doing so, the artists show how images can be used to both support progressive movements as well as reinforce and bolster systemic inequities. 

About Mark Sealy

Mark Sealy is interested in the relationships between photography and social change, identity politics, race, and human rights. He has been director of London-based photographic arts institution Autograph ABP since 1991. He has produced numerous artist publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide, including the critically acclaimed exhibition Human Rights Human Wrongs at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto in 2013 and at The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 2015.

Sealy has written for many international photography publications, including Foam Magazine, Aperture and the Independent Newspaper in London. He has written numerous essays for theoretical publications and artist monographs. In 2002, Sealy and professor Stuart Hall co-authored Different, which focused on photography and identity politics. His notable projects include the exhibition Self Evident at Ikon Gallery Birmingham, The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding / Decoding at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, and seminal and celebrated projects on the works of James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Mahtab Hussain, Maud Sulter and Sunil Gupta are just a few of the many artists exhibitions he has curated. He was also the guest curator for Houston FotoFest Biennial 2020 working under the title of African Cosmologies: Photography Time and the Other.

Learn more here: fotofest.org/fotofest-biennial-2022

FotoFest Biennial 2022 Media Sponsor:

Glasstire

Image: View of the opening night of the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, Houston, TX. Courtesy of FotoFest. Photo: Os Galindo.