#BLACKBOX
A RADICAL DIGITALITIES PROGRAMME
#Blackbox directly engages digital technology as a medium of art and visual activism in Africa and the African diaspora. In his seminal essay The Black Box (2002), curator Okwui Enwezor described a world in transformation, where curatorial practice exists as an act of public liberation, disrupting dominant Western art historical narratives. Enwezor argued that the black box, in contrast to the white cube of traditional exhibition spaces, holds within it surplus meaning, ambiguity, and the capacity for radical reimagination.
Geared towards discussion of new digital skills and contributing to research on potential developments for the creative industries in digital technologies, #Blackbox launched as a project of the RADICAL Digitalities focus area for VIAD’s RADICAL OTHERS research strand. Through participation in the Technology and Society Conference and a public panel discussion, #Blackbox began researching the necessary vocabulary required to reveal the meeting points between the 4IR and African indigenous technologies. This equitable frame of promoting new digital technologies in African artistic innovation continues to pursue art and visual activism as significant toward growing cultures of knowledge of the 4IR with African and Afrodiasporic technologies of resilience at the helm of innovative thinking and making.
EXCESS, BLACKNESS & MANY SELVES
PULENG MONGALE AND THEMBEKA SINCUBA IN DISCUSSION WITH NONDUMISO LWAZI MSIMANGA AND THE WORKS OF NATALIE PANENG AND LUNGA NTILA
ONLINE
14 October 2024
Puleng Mongale reflects on the evolution of her self-taught practice and the exploration of themes related to spirituality, belonging, identity, and womanhood. Thembeka Sincuba discusses how algorithms pose a challenge to democracy and looks at how Natalie Paneng’s Installation ‘Ke Thlogo’ feels like home. Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga introduces the #Blackbox project through Lunga Ntila’s faceless performances in photographic digital collage.
Puleng Mongale is a contemporary visual artist who specialises in photography and digital media. Since the inception of her practice, Mongale used her creative expression to probe into her subconscious to process and articulate her lived experiences. Her artistic journey has evolved into a reflective exploration of themes related to spirituality, belonging, identity and womanhood.
Lunga Ntila was a South African photographer and artist who explored themes of identity, displacement, reconciliation and healing within her powerful collage works before her untimely death in 2022. Her work becomes an embodiment of the act of collecting discarding parts of herself which are reimagined into new forms.
Natalie Paneng is a multidisciplinary artist whose innovative work spans digital art, new media and performance. Paneng’s work uses installation and digital magic to birth new worlds and surrealist narratives in which she performs. She investigates the role of the alternative black woman within warping narratives, using herself as a medium to prompt viewers to explore their own inner surrealist worlds.
Thembeka Sincuba is a sessional lecturer, writer, and curator who is deeply engaged in critically examining the intersections of abstraction, technology, and representation within African art, drawing on frameworks such as Afro-Feminism and African Futurism.
TECH-FUTURES & POETICS IN
BLACK DIGITAL ART
RUSSEL HLONGWANE AND NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS IN DISCUSSION
ONLINE
25 March 2025
This #Blackbox panel discussion takes Okwui Enwezor’s provocation into the digital art to interrogate how Black digital art and performance, in Africa and the Africa diaspora, are navigating the black box of algorithmic governance, speculative computation, and radical digitalities. Russel Hlongwane and Nolan Oswald Dennis, two thinkers at the intersection of black digital art inquiries and questions of African and Afrodiasporic ways of knowing, will engage in a conversation about the technopoetics of Blackness, its tensions between excess and access in digital systems, and the intersection of artificial intelligence, identities, and performance.
Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer based in Durban, South Africa. His work is located at the intersection of Heritage/ Modernity and Culture/ Tradition as it applies to black life. His practice includes artistic research, creative producing, design, curatorship and the creative economy. Hlongwane is part of several collectives, working groups and programmes spread across the SADC region, the continent and internationally. He has curated exhibitions and art platforms locally and abroad. His artistic work has shown extensively across Europe and Africa, whilst, to a lesser degree across parts of east Asia, United States and Latin America.
Nolan Oswald Dennis is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist who explores ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonisation. Their work questions the politics of space through a system-specific approach and are concerned with the hidden structures that condition social and political imagination. Dennis is interested in systems that transverse multiple realms and explores a coded landscape of systematic and structural conditions of world-organisation through diagrams, drawings and models. They have exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions across Europe, America and South Africa among others.
