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ALLAH TANTOU & REVOLUTIONARY GUINEA, 1968-1991
[Forthcoming Paper] My research on the 1991 film Allah Tantou by David Achkar and the documentary archive of Cold War Guinea will be presented at the 69th African Studies Association Annual Meeting in December, on the panel “Filmic Ruptures and Black World-Making: Cinema as Epistemology in African and Afro-Diasporic Context” convened by Sawel Awuni (University of Alabama) and Joel Asmah (UNC Chapel Hill). I will also participate in the roundtable “Fieldwork Under Constraint: Emerging Scholars Navigating Rupture and Remake,” chaired by Professor Robin Chapdelaine (Stanford University) and convened by Mathew Ayodele (Stanford University).
IBRAHIM MAHAMA: THE HARVEST SEASON
[Forthcoming Exhibition] Ibrahim Mahama's work explores Ghana's colonial and postcolonial legacies through contemporary issues of work, degrowth, the circulation of goods and restitution. In 2025, I assisted curators Jeanne Barral and Aby Gaye on their forthcoming exhibition Ibrahim Mahama: The Harvest Season, featuring Mahama alongside nine invited artists and collectives.
AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: ZAHRA MANSOOR
[Essay] What to call it, even? A couch, a sofa, a chaise longue, a character, a person? The instability of the name tracks how the object has exceeded its category. Mansoor acquired her now-signature purple couch during her residency at Cartels in La Défense. She found it on Leboncoin. She had been reflecting on Impressionist paintings (think Édouard Manet's Olympia) and Mansoor wanted something similar in her studio to “form a theater around.”
AFTER MATERIAL: SELECTIONS FROM THE ARAK COLLECTION
[Exhibition] An ongoing dialogue between the real, the material, and what might be understood as the after material. As an ARAK Curatorial Fellow, I am curating After Material, a group exhibition examining material practices, craft traditions, and the afterlives of discarded and repurposed objects, opening February 2026 at the University of Johannesburg. Featuring Ange Dakouo, Ocom Adonias, Matt Kayem, Paul Njihia, Njola Allen Nabukenya, and accompanied by an edited catalogue After Material: A Reader.
[2025]
REFERENCES: RESEARCH FILM SERIES
[Film Series] How might documentary cinema of the mid-twentieth century bear witness and nuance our understanding of the liberation struggles of the 60s and onward? Presented during my Southnord Residency at LuCAC, the series extends the citational practice that shapes my research and curatorial work: tracing how artists and cultural practioners have documented and reimagined histories of socio-economic and political transformation across the African continent and diaspora.
HERE, TIME PAUSES: STEPHEN PRICE
[Exhibition] To encounter a Price painting is to meet his now-signature solemn figures, at once statuesque and alive, like sculptural forms pausing to take a deep inhale. Their presence is serene, sometimes wistful, and always at ease. Price’s figures always seem to turn inward, outward, or toward something, or someone, beyond the viewer’s reach. They are absorbed in thought as much as they are absorbed by the environments that frame them.
ONE AT A TIME: VIOLA NIMUHAMYA
[Exhibition] Through her interventions, Nimuhamya preserves these embedded histories while generating radical formal and spatial possibilities. The resulting works operate across multiple registers, speaking to Norway where the materials are sourced, to Uganda where the techniques were learned, and most importantly, to the artist herself and her evolving negotiation of these entangled geographies.
FAMILIAR FORMS: LABOR, MATERIAL, AND SPACE
[Essay] Folding, threading, looping. Viola Nimuhamya’s sculptural practice begins with these gestures. She first learned basket-weaving as a child, from the women in her community in Uganda, and the intelligence of these techniques remains central to her evolving art practice today. In one of our early conversations, Nimuhamya explains that her fascination lies in taking these inherited techniques and opening them outward, allowing them to be “broken, reconfigured, and multiplied.”
BLUEPRINTS [ongoing]
For the past two years, I have been pursuing an independent research project on the history and legacy of indigo-dyeing in my home country of Guinea (Conakry). My research reflects on what an analytical and conceptual centering of indigo fabric can reveal about my country’s past and the way it stains and colors the present. I am a recipient of the Henry Richardson Labouisse 1926 Prize which has allowed me to return to Guinea and continue my research for another year. My research has been supported by the Alex Adam ‘07 Award from the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Lawrence Stone and Shelby Cullom Davis Thesis Prize from the Davis Center for Historical Studies.
An early version of BLUEPRINTS was previewed at the 19th Triennial Symposium of African Art in Chicago, IL in August 2024.
[2024]
GIVING FORM TO THE WHOLE WORLD: SAMUEL NNOROM
[Exhibition] Nnorom’s sculptural forms act as physical manifestations of how the global textile industry, and modernity more broadly, stretch across borders, weaving people together while also tying communities down. In this way, Nnorom’s works speak to the lingering effects of globalization, over-consumption, and displacement, offering an urgent and poetic representation of the modern world.
NINFO, TE QUIERO: JUAN ARANGO PALACIOS
[Exhibition] Palacios turns inward, re-examining his relationship with his homeland and exploring how love, longing, and desire endure amidst complexity and contradiction. These pieces serve as subtle self-portraits from a hypothetical universe. One to which Palacios reaches out in mourning, curiosity, and love for his country, and in that very act, conjures a new realm that is distinctly his own.
EXCEED YOUR VISION & POETIC RECORD
[Exhibition] A group exhibition curated by James Welling, presented as part of Poetic Record: Photography in a Transformed World, a two-day symposium that gathered photo-based artists, writers, curators, historians, and students to explore the poetics of photography, its instability, and its latent potential. Symposium organized by Deana Lawson, in collaboration with Jeff Whetstone. Produced by Mary K. O’Connor with Joe Arnold.
BLUEPRINTS, TRIENNIAL SYMPOSIUM ON AFRICAN ART
[Presentation] My first time presenting research at an academic conference. An early version of BLUEPRINTS was previewed at ACASA, the 19th Triennial Symposium of African Art in Chicago, IL in August 2024.
CYPHER: IMAG[IN]E PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION
[Exhibition] What does it mean to channel one's individual voice while contributing to a collective roar of resistance? To think and work within a tradition of photographers who refuse to take our representation for granted? For the past two months, artists Angel Rivera, Yomeris Alvarez Basilio, Karmanie Minnis, Shiah Versey, Sydney Del Cid, Pedro Hernandez, Kmari Thompson, Aishah Nimaga, Eliana Gonzalez, and Ariana Lorenzo have been wrestling with these questions as the inaugural cohort of IMAG(IN)E.
IMAG[IN]E: THE BLACK PHOTOGRAPHIC TRADITION
[Summer Programme] Designed to empower high schoolers in the Bronx to use film photography not only as a means of self-expression but also as a way to critically engage with and represent their communities. Over six weeks (July 27 – August 31), we explored the stakes and potential of film photography, by providing each student with their own 35mm film camera, hands-on training in photography, as well as teaching the historical context of the black photographic tradition.
[2023]
THE IMAGES CARAIBES FILM FESTIVAL
[Essay] Writing in 1992, after having attended the first two editions of the biennial festival, Africanist scholar Mbye Cham describes how Images Caraïbes marked a shift in the field of Caribbean cinema as “the first fully fledged region-wide and diaspora-wide festival of Caribbean films.”
LIVITY: THE BLACK ARTS COLLECTIVE
[Exhibition] A group exhibition curated by Azariah Jones. Titled after the Rastafarian ideology of the same name, LIVITY presents 13 Black artists’ reimaginings of these often dormant sites of memory as active portals that the deceased move through, and exist within — as able, fully feeling, and everlasting entities.
SHOOTING _______ SHADOWS: SANKOFA FASHION SHOW
[Fashion Show] My second edition of the Sankofa Fashion Show at Princeton University, this time serving as Director.
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