Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the (African) human subject using examples of visual art & museum artefacts to explore the shadow or negative form of the human body in South African museum & art histories, while also looking to broader notions of African subjectivities & futurities through the negative.

Paper long abstract:

If Africa, “the so-called dark continent[,] has its own histories of light” what would it mean to explore instances of the dark or negative in their relation to these histories? The proposed presentation seeks to investigate the (African) human subject as it is defined in the negative – specifically through bodily impressions including the shadow and the footprint. There are numerous South African history museums which contain footprint impressions of early humans in the area, some boasting artefacts along the lines of the “world’s oldest archaic human fossil footprints” – the footprint a metonym for human life - while the shadow, particularly in the form of the silhouette, has been used to define personal identity or character while also flattening and minimising individual features. Shadows show both more and less of the thing they are cast from. They are metaphorically full, the shadow of the face said to be the “soul’s true reflection”, while also empty of corporeal or graspable form. The shadow is the “other” of the body – the self’s powerful doppelganger or double, often cast in a malevolent or mysterious role. This paper will use examples of visual art and museum artefacts to explore the shadow or negative form of the human body in South African museum and art histories, while also looking to broader notions of African subjectivities and futurities through the negative.

Paper short abstract:

Tracing the manual and technological histories of xerographic photocopying and manual transfer, I consider the artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s practice of “painting with photographs,” to explore the labour of image-making, the spectrum of copy/original, and memory as it is evoked photographically.

Paper long abstract:

The Nigerian artist and McArthur ‘Genius’ Njideka Akunyili Crosby has a signature and extensively developed practice of using xerox transfers of photographs sourced from Nigerian popular media and her familial archive. Beginning with the technological history of xerography and considering the social and aesthetic implications of photocopying, this paper reads Akunyili Crosby’s gesture of xerox transfer as a means of “painting with photographs,” and makes an art historical analysis of her work using theoretical frameworks developed around both painting and photography, attempting a transmedia approach that benefits from the differences, similarities, and dialogues between types of images. Informed by Walter Benjamin’s thinking on mechanical reproduction and a Marxist position on (alienated) labour, I interpret the artistic strategy of transfer as an evocative intervention into automated image-making. Looking to varied and contradictory notions of ‘surface’ and ‘surfacism’ via European painting, West African studio portraiture, and Tina Campt's thinking on the haptic affect of photographs, I complicate the supposed inferiority of the copy as it relates to the original, and the wholeness of the positive as it relies on the negative. Emphasizing the transitory character of photography, I contend that photographs are "distributed objects" (per Elizabeth Edwards), they are malleable and liable and derive much of their meaning from these qualities that exist alongside the visual.

Paper short abstract:

Photographs retrieved from the Military Historical Archive in Lisbon allow us to consider the ‘negative imprint’ of colonial archives in the case of Mozambique. Given their indexical excess, details emerge out of intense re-examination, parallel with latent knowledge waiting to surface.

Paper long abstract:

For this paper, I return to photographs retrieved from the Military Historical Archive in

Lisbon to consider the ‘negative imprint’ of colonial archives in the case of Mozambique. For

their potential impact on changing historical discourse, in the reading of images I consider

absences, unidentified people, places, and other involuntary missing information, as well as

their poor circulation that led to colonial aphasia. Believing that photographs show much

more as different eyes and later interpretations claim different meanings, the paper proposes

their re-entry into the public sphere as a way to compensate for those lacunae while opening

the images up to the possibility of ‘other lives’ that expand our apprehension of their

potential narratives.

Images have a generative quality resulting from their prolific indexical excess; details might

become visible out of intense looking, and new understandings emerge prompted by time and

experience. This unpredictability can be, in a sense, parallel with latent knowledge waiting to

surface. The study leans on the concept of ‘material hermeneutic’ to enrich the interpretative

approach and understanding of the ‘evidential quality of photographs as an historical

statement’. It contends that, while providing an imperial visual narrative, cameras as a ‘tool

of empire’ have produced residual archival outcomes, namely photographs that can

encourage counter-narratives. Consequently, they have a dedicated future as a ‘tool of visual

history’ and are capable of a dynamic social intervention in the post-colonial setting.

Paper short abstract:

Congolese artist Freddy Tsimba’s installation “Shadows” does more than “cast a shadow” on Belgian colonial memories; it acts as a contemporary nkisi figure to honor and house the spirits of the dead. While nodding to archival absences, the shadows are also potential locations of presence and action.

Paper long abstract:

When Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa reopened to the public in 2018 after five years of renovation, the institution highlighted newly commissioned artworks by contemporary Congolese artists as examples of its new “focus on decolonization.” One such example is Freddy Tsimba’s “Shadows,” installed in the so-called “Memorial Hallway,” originally built in 1934 in remembrance of Belgians who had died in Congo. Opposite the original wall of names, Tsimba had the names of Congolese who died in Belgium etched onto the windows. When the sun shines, the names case shadows on the memorial wall.

For Tsimba, theses shadows are not just letters on glass, but rather locations meant to contain the spirits of those who had died. In this paper, I explore how the artist is using what Roberts and Jewsiewicki (2016) have termed “nkisi logic,” echoing the logic of Congolese nkisi figures, power-objects created to attract and hold spirits which can be called on to act. In this instance, the form of the shadow is less important than its content. As a negative form, the shadow also signals absences: the research to identify Congolese who died in Belgium during the colonial era is ongoing, and the numbers who died In Congo during that time are so ungraspable that estimates vary by millions of people. Further, while names may be linked to individuals, they are not necessarily linked to individual bodies. Indeed, according to Tsimba, they should be understood to stand for the many unnamed victims of Belgian colonization.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine a small set of vernacular photographs that document South African anti-apartheid, LBGT rights, and AIDS activist Simon Nkoli in community with Black Diaspora queer activists to raise questions about African queer pasts, futures, in/visibilities, and the limit of the archive.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, “South Africa's Simon Nkoli in/and Diaspora Vibrations: Photographs, Archive, AIDS, and Listening to the Frequencies of a Black Queer Internationalism,” I cull and explore a small set of photographs (and adjacent texts) that document South African anti-apartheid, gay and lesbian rights, and AIDS activist Simon Nkoli in community with Black Diaspora queer activists working and gathering in the United States and Western Europe. Following Tina M. Campt’s method of listening to images and Santu Mofokeng's invocation to seek the significance of Black life in image beyond the frame, I attend to how these vernacular snapshots of and by Black queers taken during the early decades of the AIDS crisis hum with shadows, absences, and ambivalent forms of presence that echo with loss, compounded grief, and at times sing joy into the fissures. As I strain against reifying a historical narrative that set the terms of Nkoli’s activist and intimate internationalism within a majority white gay Anglo-European transnational community, I attempt to trace an alternative reading–one that specifically attends to the Black Diaspora connections and conversations in which Nkoli participated, and at times, precipitated, and perhaps, unsuccessfully attempted. Lastly, I pose questions about African queer futurities that might challenge visibility and archive as central modes of registering Black queer pasts.