“Like so many of us, the great lockdown of 2020 (as I call it) forced me to slow down and stay still, and at the same time, it brought heightened attention to so many things Black folks have endured for too long. It has brought people together and brought them out and onto the streets in massive numbers even at the risk of death to say they will no longer tolerate violence and injustice.
The disproportionate effects of the pandemic and police violence on the bodies of Black people has amplified what refusal means in our contemporary moment. Black artists have a special role in helping us to understand this moment, and in helping us to imagine how we might chart a different future of living otherwise. ‘Reading the Moment’ for me means reflecting on what black artists teach us about the art of refusal…”
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In response to VIAD’s new digital platform, Reading the Moment, Tina Campt has shared a curated offering of video-based dialogues and art exchanges. In each of these, her reflections register in relation to the work of friends, colleagues and artists with whom she is personally engaged in the critical, creative, often fugitive work of imagining Black life otherwise.
The in-community orientation of this considered selection anticipates the forthcoming release of The Sojourner Project online curriculum, scheduled for late October 2020. The Sojourner Project is a mobile Black studies academy imagined and supported by the Practicing Refusal Collective, in collaboration with VIAD and Art for Humanity (Durban University of Technology). Convened by Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, the Practicing Refusal Collective is an international forum of artists, writers, scholars and performers dedicated to initiating dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence and black futurity in the twenty-first century.
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Okwui Okpokwasili, Poor Peoples TV Room, photo by Mena Burnette of xmbphotography
Tina Campt presents a talk on slowness, focusing on the work of artists Okwui Okpokwasili and Dawoud Bey. Fellow panelist, Simone White reads recent writing that considers hesitation, emotional observation, and the ready availability of words to fit situations. Together, they find bridges, resonances, and counterpoints between their work.
Credits: Recorded on June 10, 2020, Screened on June 15, 2020 as part of the School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 2, UArts MFA in Dance | temporaryliveness.org | uarts.edu/academics/graduate/mfa-dance
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John Akomfrah, Handsworth Songs, 1986, Single channel 16mm colour film transferred to video, sound 58 minutes 33 seconds © Smoking Dogs Films, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
On Thursday 18 June 2020, Lisson Gallery hosted a live discussion with artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah, alongside theorist Tina Campt and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman. Chaired by Ekow Eshun, the panel examined the legacy of Akomfrah's early films such as Signs of Empire (1983) and Handsworth Songs (1986), as well as structures of protest and institutional racism.
"On the one hand, there's the question of what kind of history is being claimed in these particular kinds of monuments. But on the other hand, there is also the impetus to destroy, right? And, one of the things that I was so struck by, in revisiting Handsworth Songs in relationship to Signs of Empire, were the kind of echoes that we hear, there was a moment at which I watched the whole thing and then I rewatched it without watching and I just listened to it – I listened to the entire thing. And to actually hear the echoes between police violence, harassment – just literally the terms that kept coming up – harassment, you know, when people have had enough, listening to the story of Cynthia Jarrett in Broadwater Farm estate and the echoes with Breonna Taylor” - Tina Campt
Credits: VIAD thanks to Lisson Gallery for sharing this material / www.lissongallery.com
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Installation view of Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Courtesy of Arthur Jafa and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome. Photo by Cathy Carver
In solidarity with Black Lives Matter protests across the US and the globe, Arthur Jafa’s video installation, Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) was streamed live from the 26-28 June 2020 by 13 leading art museums and collections. In support of this transnational showing, Jaffa asked Tina Campt to moderate a two-part series of roundtables, focussed on Black art and revolution. The series was commissioned by Jaffa’s new platform Sunhaus, which aims to “create a Black cinema calibrated to the cultural, socioeconomic and existential particulars of Black being”.
Participants: Tina Campt (moderator), Peter L’Official, Thomas Lax, Josh Begley, Elleza Kelley, Aria Dean, Rashaad Newsome, Isis Pickens & Simone White.
Credits: Sunhaus / www.sunhaus.us
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Tina Campt, VIAD RA
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