Delve into the ideas behind the Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic, with curator Ekow Eshun and artists Sedrick Chisom, Cauleen Smith and Lina Iris Viktor.
Sedrick Chisom is a painter and writer. At the centre of his practice is a commitment to confounding racial origin myths and pseudosciences, creating apocalyptic fantasies in writing and painting. Appropriating imagery from Black Lives Matter demonstrations, medieval Christian iconography and Greek mythology, Chisom questions who has the power to construct natural and social worlds.
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-20th-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, developing world cinema and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants.
Lina Iris Viktor is a conceptual artist, painter, and performance artist. Her works are a merging of painting, sculpture, performance and photography, along with the practice of water gilding with 24-karat gold to create increasingly dark canvases embedded with layers of light. She creates philosophical commentary through material that addresses the infinite and the finite, immortality and mortality, the microcosm and macrocosm, in addition to the socio-political and historical preconceptions surrounding ‘blackness’ and its universal implications.
Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group and the former Director of the ICA, London. He is the author of Africa State of Mind, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize, and Black Gold of the Sun, nominated for the Orwell prize. He is a Contributing Editor at Wallpaper magazine and is a member of the advisory board of Liquid Blackness Journal. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from London Metropolitan University.
Date: Thu 30 Jun, 7pm
Venue: St Paul’s Roof Pavilion, Level 6, Blue Side, Royal Festival Hall
£8
