#BLACKBOX: Tech-Futures & Poetics in Black Digital Arts

Artwork credit: Russel Hlongwane, Ifu Elimnyama (The Dark Cloud) (2019); Video; 6:35 minutes.

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.

This #Blackbox panel discussion takes 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.

As digital structures in the 4th Industrial Revolution contribute to definitions of African and Afrodiasporic futures, how do artist-academics working with sound, performance, and digital aesthetics engage with the opaque, unknowable processes of AI, machine learning, and algorithmic control? What happens when Blackness is rendered through technological systems that seek to either erase, survey, or commodify it? How are rituals, new and old, disrupting the sense of inevitable peril rendered by racist capitalism and colonisation? And can performance systems such as music, language, body, and other intermedial manifestations in digital arts queer the ways history is known?

#Blackbox is a discursive and artistic space that refuses simplistic narratives of technological progress and instead embraces the queer frictions, playful ambiguities and radical inventions that emerge when Black performance meets digitality.

In #Blackbox: Tech-Futures & Poetics in Black Digital Arts Russel Hlongwane and Nolan Oswald Dennis speak to their work with digital technologies and art. They engage themes of Black technopoetics, digital excess, speculative African futurisms, AI, performance art, and decolonial technological interventions.

Join us online on Tuesday, 25 March 2025 at 18h00 SAST as we discuss Black Digital Futurism in the #Blackbox.

BIOGRAPHIES

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.

A winner of numerous awards, Hlongwane received the Jury Prize (2019) for his experimental film, Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud at the Sharjah Film Platform and is a Lumen Prize Global Majority Award winner, along with collaborators Knoetze and Wilson for their work DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness⁠. He has published through academic and art journals on design, artistic practice, technopolitics and urban studies. As a consultant, he works with cultural institutions and government departments concerned with providing meaningful support to creative ecologies. As part of this interest, he has served on boards of many organisations in the sector, currently on the Prince Claus International Advisory Committee (2023-2025).

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 a number of solo shows in locations including Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Swiss Institute, New York; and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. Other group exhibitions include the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016); the Young Congo Biennale (2019); Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); FRONT Triennial, Cleveland; Lagos Biennial; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Architekturmuseum der TU München, amongst other highly prestigious galleries and museums worldwide. The artist’s work was also shown on the VIAD curated show, SYM|BIO|ART INTRA-ACTING AT THE CRITICAL NODE BETWEEN BIOTECHNOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY ART exhibition (2023, FADA Gallery, UJ).

Dennis is a member of artist groups NTU and Index Literacy Program and a member of the Eduoard Glissant Art Fund Scientific Committee and a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre.