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ON PAPUS AND THE TEMPORALITIES OF GUINEAN MODERNISM
[Forthcoming Paper] My research on the Guinean painter Aboubacar Bangoura, known as “PAPUS,” will be presented at the CAA 115th Annual Conference in February 2027, on the panel “Against the Exclusionary Postcolonial Canon: Rewriting African Modernisms,” convened by Clement Akpang. Examining his realist paintings of a changing Conakry and his founding role in the legendary Comp’Art collective, the paper considers whether Guinea’s apparent absence from the canonical story of African modernism reflects not a lack of modernist practice, but the different institutional, economic and temporal conditions under which that modernism took shape.
[2026]
RHYTHMIC ATTITUDE: AVA BINTA GIALLO
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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).
SOUTHNORD VOL 1.
THE HARVEST SEASON: DOROTHY AKPENE AMENUKE
For the catalogue of Ibrahim Mahama: The Harvest Season I contributed a short text on invited artist Dorothy Akpene Amenuke and her sculptural practice.
AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: ZAHRA MANSOOR
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.”