Rizvana Bradley

ACADEMIC ARTS SYMPOSIA

A body touched, touching, fragile, vulnerable, always changing, fleeing, ungraspable, evanescent under a caress or a blow, a body without a husk, a poor skin stretched over the cave where our shadow floats … (Jean-Luc Nancy)
 
This conference day will focus on the haptic through the resonance of touch. Extending our critical sense of the haptic through attendant, experimental grammars of touch, we confront a set of sometimes unruly and even wild philosophical and artistic imperatives.  For the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, touch marks the limits of how we come to know ourselves both in and beyond our finitude.  Touch has enabled us to enrich our techniques of knowing, making possible a rediscovery of the modalities of movement, matter, and sense that comprise our subject and object worlds.  Thematically, touch will recur in our discussions of artworks, and in our explorations of the irreducibly textured expressions of performance and social practice.  Weaving between image, sound, and the poetic line, the conversations in this conference day will navigate the overlaps and cuts between them. The included readings, performances, and talks will explore diasporic forms of world-making, dynamic philosophies of movement, the violence of cartographic and architectural imaginaries, the material trace of touch in economies of performance, and the haptic violence manifested in history’s archival inscriptions.

Participants include Hortense Spillers, Eyal Weizman, Aracelis Girmay, Erin Manning, Ligia Lewis, Wu Tsang, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Serpentine Gallery
Hapticality, Waywardness, and the Practice of Entanglement: A Study Day with Saidiya Hartman

London, UK
July 8th, 2017

In collaboration with Serpentine Gallery, on the occasion of Arthur Jafa's exhibition, Professor Saidiya Hartman (Columbia University) joined scholars, artists and writers to discuss themes from her landmark text, Scenes of Subjection, including questions of political economy and ecology, race, gender and legal theory. 

Participants included Rizvana Bradley, Helen Cammock, Tina Campt,  Kodwo Eshun, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, Christian Nyampeta and Karen Salt. Screening films by Francis Alÿs, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and Karrabing Film Collective. With print contributions from Nathaniel Mackey and Hypatia Vourloumis.

Supported by Women & Performance, a journal of feminist theory

Photos by Ana Godinho de Matos 

This symposium, co-hosted by BFI and King’s College London Department of Film Studies, brought scholars and practitioners together to share insights into the history of black cinema, black politics and black stardom. Through presentations and discussions, we considered the historical evolution of the black movie star, while also examining “blackness” in visual culture, and the aesthetics and politics of black stardom. We also examined strategies of resistance in black cinema, that stretch from the earliest activist actors through to today’s most vocal proponents of the Black Lives Matter movement.