IN-PERSON: IAS Book Launch: Colonial Legacies
26 April 2022, 6:00 pm–7:30 pm
We welcome Gabriella Nugent (University of East Anglia) for the launch of her new book. Respondents: Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (UCL) and Ferdinand De Jong (University of East Anglia).
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All | UCL staff | UCL students | UCL alumni
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
IAS Common GroundGround floor, South Wing, Wilkins BuildingLondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
In Colonial Legacies, Gabriella Nugent examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations of Belgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo. Focusing on three artists and one artist collective, Nugent analyses artworks produced by Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga and Kongo Astronauts, each of whom offers a different perspective onto this history gleaned from their own experiences. In their photography and video art, these artists rework existent images and redress archival absences, making visible people and events occluded from dominant narratives. Their artworks are shown to offer a re-reading of the colonial and immediate post-independence past, blurring the lines of historical and speculative knowledge, documentary and fiction. Nugent demonstrates how their practices create a new type of visual record for the future, one that attests to the ramifications of colonialism across time.
Participants
Gabriella Nugent
Ferdinand de Jong
Ferdinand de Jong (PhD, University of Amsterdam) is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East Anglia where he teaches African art, anthropology, and cultural heritage. He is the author of Masquerades of Modernity: power and secrecy in Casamance, Senegal (2007) and co-editor, with Michael Rowlands, of Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa (2007). De Jong has also published extensively on the colonial archive and the need for its decolonization. His next monograph, Decolonizing Heritage: time to repair in Senegal, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2022).
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is Associate Professor of African Anthropology at University College London. She has carried out fieldwork in Senegal, France and the UK. Her study of social mobility in Dakar, as seen through the lives and work of dancers and musicians, was published in 2013 as a prize-winning monograph, Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal. Between 2005 and 2015, Neveu Kringelbach held several positions as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Oxford, at the School of Anthropology and the African Studies Centre.
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