 Thank you everyone for coming. It's my great pleasure to welcome you here tonight on behalf of the Brooklyn Museum and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, where Wagechi Mutu, a fantastic journey, has been entrancing audiences for over a month. As organizing curator for the center's presentation, it has been an honor to work with Wagechi, her dedicated studio team, the original curator, Trevor Schumacher and the National Museum of Art on this beautiful exhibition. For tonight, I'd also like to thank our special guests, our manager of adult programming, Elizabeth Callahan and Dr. Elizabeth Sackler. It is a further joy and privilege to introduce tonight's program and share with all of you. Around seven or eight months ago, when Wagechi and I first talked about programming and were discussing this evening, I can honestly say that Nora Chippumire and Adrienne Edwards are the first two teams out of her mouth. We've been considering themes in her work that might be drawn out through programming and performance and performativity as strands not only in her videos of durational collaborations but also in her collages and installations and sculptures was something that she wanted to talk about. Well, I guess she was already deep into a collaboration with Nora that will be at the Smithsonian and Nora's choreographic work, Muriam had recently appeared at BAM, and we realized as well that our exhibition would overlap with Performa, which is the performance art by Adrienne is associate curator of. So really it would have been impossible to think of a better constellation of speakers who could join Wagechi for this conversation. And so we're thrilled that this dream was able to become a reality and that you are all sitting here tonight. So thank you. I personally can't wait to hear what happens. So I'm gonna keep introductions brief. Born in Mutarez and Bague and currently living in New York City, Nora Chippumira has been challenging stereotypes of Africa and the black performing body, art and aesthetics for the past decade. She studied dance in many parts of the world including Africa, Cuba, Jamaica and the US. A graduate of the University of Zimbabwe's Law School Chippumira holds an MA in dance and an MFA in choreography and performance from Mills College and has been an adjunct faculty member at Arizona State University Tempe, Bennington College, the University of Minnesota Minneapolis and Barnard College. A featured performer with the dance company Urban Bushwomen from 2003 to 2008. She served as their associate artistic director from 2007 to 2008. She's been presenting her own choreographic work some of which she'll discuss in a moment nationally, internationally and on film receiving numerous awards including an Albert Award in the arts, a United States Artist Award Fellowship and two New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards. Her work has been supported by the Math Fund, the Durham Foundation, Knife of Build and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Our moderator tonight, Adrienne Edwards is a curator, scholar and writer of performance with a focus on artists of the African diaspora and the global south. As mentioned before she's associate curator for Performa Institute which has been filling our cities and calendars this month with what seems like an endless array of exciting events. She's also a curator at large for third streaming. A PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where she is a Corrigan doctoral fellow, her research interpolates visual art performance, experimental dance, critical race theory, feminist theory and post-structuralist philosophy. Adrienne has written on the works of Iona Rosile Brown, Lorraine Grady, O'Grady, Bill T. Jones, Gregory McCommer, Tracy Rose and McLean Thomas and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs including Clifford Owen's anthology for MoMA PS1, four for the Studio Museum in Harlem and most recently Wagachin Utu for the Museum of Contemporary Art City. And finally the artist inspiring tonight's event, Wagachin Utu is a Brooklyn based artist whose multimedia practice and composing collage, sculpture, installation, video and performance has garnered her recognition as one of the foremost contemporary artists working today. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, she came to New York to study art, receiving her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA from Yale in 2000. A recipient of the Deutsche Bank first artist of the year award in 2010, as well as the Brooklyn Museum's 2013 Artist of the Year Award. Wagachin has most recently participated in the International Center of Photography's Triennial, the Fifth Moscow Biennale, the Paris Triennial Intense Proximity curated by Oboe and Wazer as well as the Kochi Muzeris Biennale, the first in India. In the past year alone, she has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the National Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina and the Stathley-Quinztalo Bottom Bottom Germany. Wagachin's work is in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Please help me welcome our special distinguished guest. Thank you to Saisha Grisen and also Elizabeth Callahan for bringing us together and to the Brooklyn Museum overall. When I was preparing for tonight, one of the things I was thinking about was what is it that brings these two women together? And there's some obvious points of collision. The women, their African, their artist, their cosmopolitan, but then I think perhaps less obvious to you now but perhaps what we can really explore tonight are their aesthetics of fragmentation, their use of repetition, exhaustion in terms of their approach to the black female body and black female subjectivity. And then also the ways in which they mine the archive typically through interventions and modernism, anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, literature, I could go on. But more often, because I know these women personally is also just the force of them and their will and their desire and their sort of insistent drive to experimentation. Norma shows us the ways in which dance is immensely visual and reveals our own ways of looking and our perception of what bodies like ours can do. And when Gashi alumines the fundamental antagonisms of being in art with her disturbing beauty and bringing in a stoop rigor to her gestures and objects. And I'm interested in these junctures and intersections between them and their aesthetics and their sensibilities and ideologies. And my question for me is really where do they see themselves in one another's work? And they actually, we should know, have been in dialogue for some time now but are presently undertaking a project part of Artist in Dialogues at the Smithsonian Institutions Museum of African Art which will premiere in a project in 2015. So where we're gonna go from here is that when Gashi will start and she'll talk a little bit and show some work and Norma will do the same. And then we'll have a conversation and then a Q and A and we'll be done. And thrilled to be here with friends and peers and people who I have great private conversations with and now we get to talk in front of you. So, but I'm not gonna talk in length about these images. I'm gonna let them speak for themselves and then we'll discuss things that relate to our work and are interested in each other. So, in case you can't see at the bottom left it says Kikuyu Women's, circa 1900. And this is these are the people I come from. But I particularly like this image because first of all it's a photograph and it's a picture of the very last remaining moments before the British had completely transformed Kenya into what it is. So these are my women, women of my nation before British colonialism had taken over. This is a work that I did called Cleaning Earth. It's actually a video performance piece. So I enact this labor of cleaning this patch of earth, which is in actual fact a very badly maintained garden in my backyard. And I wanted to think about painting and composition and kind of idealize this figure that I was representing. But obviously this woman is working. The black female body is in full on labor, work mode, tirelessly trying to clean the earth, a Sisyphean activity which obviously made me, made the woman as dirty as the ground that she's cleaning but also didn't do much to clean the soil. And eventually I end up in the forefront. So I'm always in this sort of composition where you can see me in the forefront that I moved all the way from the back of the garden to the front. She sees dance in exuberant work done 2012 and it's a moment when I feel my life and the circumstances that surround me entail a dance that's private but full of openness and in a way happiness I guess. And I try to dance like one does when they're not being washed especially when it's not a professional dancer. And she sees dance and it's reflecting and projected on a reflective surface. So there's a lot of back and forth image is both playing itself with the audience. The audience can see itself in the garden. There's a lot of glimmering and twinkling and femininity and as I said exuberance is the best word for this moment. And at the same time there's also this lurking, these eyes watching her and they're synced in different ways. So they're sort of very awkward. Guva is another performance video work. This is all Guva, this is her out in the world. Impressive video, thank you. So that's it for now, I think Nora's gonna show us a video. Perhaps we should just go right ahead to the last half of it. That's a way to begin. My own work is that I am very much invested in discovering myself to just being a dancer and an object. So the process of finding myself leads me to always be working with my own body and also primarily invested in working with myself alone as a solo voice. The fact that I am a woman is a huge fascination even to myself and so I think the last heifer came, I mean the heifer is also an insult, right? So it came from a place too of trying to embrace something about being female that isn't, there's always something a little bit funky about it. So I wanted to claim this whole idea when somebody says you're heifer and I'm like yes, well now look at this heifer. I'm gonna be the last heifer you ever say heifer too. I'm gonna say it like I mean it, but bounce-ranging and also embracing something about cows, celebrating. So I actually think there's something about celebrating my gender, celebrating my own discovery of being woman accepting what that means, the responsibility of that but also it is always I believe laced with the fact that I am born and raised in Zimbabwe and I am my mother's daughter. And having left Zimbabwe somehow allowed me to walk into a space where I could question what that was, what that meant. And so using my body allows me to be in a constant place of questioning and discovering. I really don't know what the answer is but I enjoy absolutely posing the question and trying to discover it viscerally and in a space of for instance this piece I think was perhaps half an hour. I like to do works that develop unfold over time. So short works are necessarily my forte. Anything that goes beyond an hour I feel like I'm in my comfort zone with lengthy monologues or self portraits in a way there are also self portraits in a way there are also monologues, there are debates on these dialogues with myself first but in this space of time, space and force so we call dance. So that's the discovering of myself as a female human being who comes from a particular place is something that I continue to find to find that it provides me material. And also discovering this female human being body outside of my own cultural context is something that also I find very rich and in a way may have been given, I feel lucky I have been given an opportunity to speak in a way that I probably could not in my mother's house. I really like these two presentations of your work because at a dinner party, maybe now several weeks ago at Normie said, whenever I'm working with dancers I always ask them, what are you doing now? Let's start with where you are. And I think that these things really show the ways in which you start with what you are, what you know. And I guess it's something interesting thinking about the show, fantastic journey because what many people don't realize is that performance and also installation was a part of your work from the very beginning. So I'm very curious as to why you had the inclination to work in multiple disciplines. What is it that working with performance in particular, whether it's videos or otherwise, does for you, what does it bring to the work? And Nora, I wanted to ask that of you because right where the piece that you just premiered is part of the Crossing the Line Festival takes place, your dance takes place in a sculptural installation, there's a use of text. So I'm interested for you as someone who describes yourself as a dancer, as a choreographer. What does that do for you? How does that make the work different so maybe we can go? So for me, I feel the main thing is that I had, I thought I had no choice. I came to art through a rejection of the other forms of my life, which was I actually acted on the sign in Kenya and I found it so difficult to continue in that route because I didn't have, first of all, the support system because my parents and my peers didn't think it was something that was viable. And then at some point I just got discouraged because I was told enough times that we dirty women go on stage, get off stage, get into something that's gonna take you into a serious adult life. And so I shrank back into the studio in a way. I basically chose a form where I could close the door and do what I wanted to do. And I guess the coming out for me was leaving my home country and arriving in a place where I had no connections. I was anonymous, I was unsafe, I was fearless, I was disconnected. And that in and of itself forced me to have to come up with a self that was new, that was what I wanted to really be. And that thing, in a way, is a performance. It's a reconstruction of yourself the way you've rather have been around the people who you came from. And I think, so I approached it from that direction. I think there was always translation. There was always explaining of my accent, explaining of where I'm from, explaining where Kenya is, explaining how to say my name, all of these things had a lot of, I think, this self-creation. But then I think what also happened to me is I was unfortunate, I didn't have great painting teachers. So I also opted for sculpture and video and all these other forms that allowed me to piece together some of the forms that I related to as contemporary African arts, where things are integrated. So music, dance, the visual are less segmented. Painting is about painting and I love working in two dimensions but I couldn't start up the conversation in those classes that was meaningful to my own story. So I again ran into and ran away from what, another thing, I ran towards sculpture, ran towards these isolated performances. We're quite private, I had a video camera and myself often or my brother filming me myself and that was it. And then I actually studied sculpture for my master's. I didn't actually go to Yale for painting. I get thrown into painting all the time and I always have to say, I know nothing about painting but I'm here to talk in this painting department. So even these two dimensional works that are in the exhibition, one of the peculiar things about them for me is that they're not really paintings. I'm a drawer who's ended up, because I have dexterity and I'm kind of a little bit sinister, I cut it a lot. And that's where I ended up. There's something about my performance that has gone into this other place where I create characters but, and these characters are many layers of things that both I've experienced as a young woman, I've seen, I've wanted to become, I am, and then this other practice which is creating these illusionary worlds. And it all comes together. I think you see it particularly in the video performances for sure. It's like I always say you're like, you witness the becoming, you're becoming what people identify as the cyborgs of your collages, right? And the play aspect of that, which is so fun. Plexiglass. What about Plexiglass? Actually, you know, being with Wangechi, it's kind of clear, I'm a choreographer, I'm a mover, that my first language is physical. You know, even though I do really, truly firmly believe that dance is a visual form as well. I mean, clearly, you look at it and it's moving. And there are some choreographers who are masters at making it, almost filming. And you can think of how most cutting on would paint, you know, and so I think in some ways they're really much very related forms. I also do believe that coming from Africa that the separation of dance from a visual, you know, those two categories are necessarily real. There is no dance performance in most parts of Africa that would not include all the elements that you would maybe put aside as visual elements in of themselves. So I have always worked with that principle that, you know, I want to create a visceral visual image as well as a kinesthetic atmosphere. So with this most recent work that I am currently in the midst of the riot, I wanted to put myself on display as if a performer is never on display. But kind of really highlight the fact that performers and performance are really the consumable ideas, consumable entities. And I think a great deal of that thinking has come out of the conversations that we've been having over the past year or so. The solution of display, the between and all of these sort of objectifying models that we've found ourselves thinking about so much in very different ways. But they come to the overlap of our conversations. And also the idea that in the, or at least what seems to really separate what one gets to does and what I do is the sense that at the end of the day you can walk away with an object that you can buy. That is a visual object and you place it on your wall. So I'm really intrigued with this. What do you walk away with from a dance performance? So I was really going for this idea of making myself an object inside of this box. And this box with an accompanying text is my black African body. And it's part of some private ownership, it's owned by somebody. So we tried to really myself and the team that I worked with embrace some of the things in the white box that come from those white boxes, those museums, and sort of hijack them for a black box which is where the dance lives in a black box. And I really go for that idea, what if I was this object, what if I was for lack of a better way to put it, one of these women and one gets you some paintings that comes alive. You know? Well, all skin and pin up and no apology. So that's currently a really intriguing place. What do you hold, what is tangible about dance? I think a lot of institutions are trying to sort that out. I think for me what's enviable about Nora's form, and in fact that's what I think our conversations keep expanding in these different directions. But one of the things for me is the shape shifting that is possible in your form. It's so magnetic and intriguing and powerful. And in some ways I guess it came through in the animation but I feel like there's so many things that are moving in time in my imagination and I place them in this collage, I calcify them, I petrify them, I basically hold them in one little moment, in one frame. But I think performance is powerful from that perspective, it is slippery. It's, in many ways that's part of what is so important about I think removing yourself from that place of comfort because there's movement and that movement is discovery of a new side, you know? And also the refusal to stay still also prevents people from saying what they think you are. You know, you get to define yourself every given second which I think is really, I don't know how you do it but it's kind of unbelievable, right now. Yeah, I think in some ways part of what has been exciting about our dialogue is that I see movement in your work, you know? And I can go inside of a piece and then make it my own and just go somewhere else with it. And that's not typical of many objects that you see stuck on a wall, you know? They're just kind of, oh, okay. But I do remember the first time I saw a Wangechi go to a picture, I think it was in a fashion magazine. And of course I was like, whoa, what is that? She's African, oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. It was absolutely scary but I couldn't look away. You know, and then the dare, the provocation, the movement, the kinesthetic feel that I was getting from the image. Just, I just wanted to jump into that picture. I don't really remember which one it was but it was one of the women. Oh, no, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You know, so it was just so exciting to be able to see. I think for me what I, I was repulsed but I was also drawn in. I was completely, there's a word for it. No good African girl could do this. I think as they, as my understanding of the images has sort of grown and I also started to understand that I'm also doing kind of like crazy things. And identifying with the movement, the color, the life, the life, they just seem alive. So I guess that it's equal envy on both sides. How do you go home with an object that seems alive? That's what I want to do. I want people to leave my performances with something that has completely been imprinted into their psyches. It's funny you stored psyche because I was thinking about both of you and thought the ways in which your word is really about activating kind of psychic caves, like these mental places. In a weird way, it's almost uncanny because you realize, oh, I, you know, there's this theory of visuality that what you see and recognize is because you already know it, right? It's like, you can't recognize that what you haven't already somehow been introduced to. So it's about touching this place that you may or not even realize is already there. So do you recognize? Yeah, we have to recognize that in each other's. There's this kind of, you know, DNA connection, but also when I mean that formally and artistically, DNA, we're not sisters, such, in that way. But I think one of the things I also realize is I knew something about the way I had been saying things was evading description. And when I saw Oris work, the first time at 251 Oris, I'm forgetting the name of the piece. The lines were wrong. Yeah, exactly. I think that's the first time I felt like, okay, this is that place that we come from. And you were mixing that issue that you brought up. This, you know, this dominant colonial language that has been sitting on us for the last, whatever, hundreds or so years, brought with it kind of a puritanical, sort of a widing out of things. And education that I think we both have done well with and in fact, you know, trained in and all this nonsense. And I remember seeing your work, this really naughty movement. And this very, very trained, in particular, the intelligent cheekiness that was about saying, we were comfortable with our bodies. You know, we've been comfortable with our bodies. Now we've adopted this thing and we have to reconfigure our bodies so we can pretend that we weren't comfortable before. And I'll tell you what, we were comfortable when you kept doing these things. And I was like, yes, you know, throw your skirt in the air and do all those things at a Catholic school in all these sort of kind of Britishized annual situations, we were told, no, no, no, no, but our parents, in order to get us to this whatever stage where we were educated, said no, no, no, no. And I think, so I saw that rebelliousness in there that, but it was a particular feminine and female and gender-benderly, yummy kind of rebellion that I thought, I got, I need to talk to her, I'm ready to talk. And that is, I think, what's, what's part of the good thing there is parallel, that we just sort of been going on in both our works and we hadn't really realized it in terms of finding it. So, but I think it's interesting because I've already gotten the five-minute mark before we go to Q&A, I'm gonna take the privilege of the moderator and ask one question that I really wanted to ask you guys because I was reading, as I often do on accessories, I know her stint, right? She seems to always illuminate things. And I was sitting here with my two African sisters and needed another Southern black American, which I am, to kind of be on par with these two. And I was reading her characteristics of Negro expression, which was written in 1934. And maybe later on we can talk about it if there's time, but if not, I just want to mark it to say, I wanted to ask you to, when you arrive to the United States and this concept of blackness, how did you as Africans negotiate this within an American context? In other words, what does that concept mean to you? Do you feel that it's irrelevant? Do you feel that it's meaningful? Do you feel that it's useful? Where do you negotiate that as a paradigm? And I'll turn it to Nora because... Because I have issues. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Can I read a quote? Yeah, go ahead. I'm Popelle. To be black today is a choice that has to be made like we made, like a cake or a bed or a contract or a promise or a solar system. Race was invented by less blacks to create a power relation that served their own interests. In the most obvious sense, less blacks can sometimes be people who are referred to or referred to themselves as white. In our way of thinking, less blacks are people who, if you ask them whether they would prefer to be black or less black, would say less black. Since the 17th century, blacks have been about the project of making their own meanings around blackness. Over time, this project has become much more public. Some blacks wanted to create meanings around blackness that were protected from less blacks. And I just love this quote and... Yeah, I think at some point there were two sort of defining moments in my time in America. The first one was somebody on the street called me a nigger and said, get out of the way, nigger. And I was like, I'm not a nigger, you fool, I'm an African. I was so upset, I couldn't quite get over it that that idiot couldn't tell the difference. But then the second moment was, I've always danced in women's companies and I have to say, you know, African American women have embraced me and made me a sister and have taught me a great deal about how to survive. So one of those sisters said to me, but you're not black, you're African. So, you know, nigger, not black, African, you know, and I had to, I had come to America, old pan-Africanist, you know, thinking all blacks were created equal and that it was the same. And so, you know, having my difference being sort of pointed out or my blackness being lumped into a bigger blackness, I think there have been issues that have really provoked me and challenged me and helped me realize that there was actually a beauty in accepting the fact that African is not the same as being black, you know? So what's the distinction? That I am my culture, the way I've been brought up, the way I live, the way I comport myself is African. There's no color to that. Being black is a real aesthetic. Yeah, that books. And so I think that idea of a reinvention and all, there is an aesthetic, there is an, and in dance, there is really something called black dance unfortunately, which clearly means there's something called white dance. But there's a real clear understanding of what that looks like. People are assuming that just because I'm black, I'm doing black dance, or just because I'm African, I'm doing African dance, you know? But I find those two spaces of, you know, really interesting, you know? They lead me towards a margin which is really charged and a potential to always disrupt what the assumptions are about what Africa or what African is or what black is. We're clearly in black and African and I can separate those two or be those two at the same time. I think one of the things about coming to the US from the continent, from Kenya, from Africa for me was that we had a very clear idea of what the visitor is named, you know? So people who are in Zungu are just coming to travel to look around. And in fact now the term has become, it's a Kiswahili term and it's become like a very, again it states, it's still, it's become a racial term. It means a white person, but it actually doesn't mean a white person. It means somebody who's running around almost aimlessly because I think the original Zungu was this traveler, this explorer, this missionary just kind of wandering with no family and no connection. And then eventually of course you realize that they had these very particular ideas. But so coming to these things for me was an awakening, a racial awakening. I had assumed that I knew about race. I didn't know anything because being race in a majority black nation, you don't walk around going, you're black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black, I'm black. We just don't, because everybody is identifiable in very specific nuanced ways. And in fact you can tell a Kanpa from Maloui, from Kikuyu, you know, you can tell these very specific nations that are pre British Bikulonio, maybe all of the European stuff. And if you're African, you can tell the Sudanese person from Somali, from the South African. And those are the terms that I came with and I think Nora came with too. So to come to a place where without being warned, you're told, you're one of them, was difficult, confusing, and your reaction, my reaction, I'm gonna speak for myself, was to be confused, to be slightly resentful, to go, what is that? And then to immediately try to figure out what am I being called and why, you know? And I remember this one woman who worked at Parsons School of Design, I think she was an assistant of the director. Sharon is a southern woman and she said, Sharon, what is this race, what is this black thing? She said, child. And we tell her, when you see it, you're never gonna stop seeing it. And I was like, oh no. Cause I knew there was a moment where I would get it and that would be it. It would never be the same again. And eventually you realize, you know, this is not the city, the state where people are burning crosses necessarily or you know, people aren't tired. So race is very nuanced. Racism is quite nuanced from a day to day basis. You cannot identify and go, that's a racial incident right there. I mean, certainly there are those, but it's even more dangerous is probably a heavy word, but I feel that because I couldn't tell and then I realized why I couldn't tell. I realized that there was these cults, these things that were happening under the current and that those things were what I needed to figure out and to learn and to blacken up, you know, grow up. And I started honestly by learning my Caribbean and you know, the diaspora, the history of Haiti and the kind of the syncratic practices that you have in some of these spaces were what made me understand how race operates because I couldn't, I guess I couldn't sync myself right in the States initially and then I sort of looked at Brazil and then move closer and closer and kind of learn more about what U.S. racial history comes out of and what really I was doing with. So I think, you know, I always say I was racialized in America. I am into my identity as a black person here, which is an odd thing to do at the age of 21, 22, because you've got this other mind that's very clearly formed and aware of another history and another confidence and a lot of Africans, in fact, choose not to identify with blackness or black history because it's heavy and it's real, you know? And in O'What, unfortunately it's a choice for them, not a choice for everybody. So, you know, I'm thinking about Lupeeta Nyong'o's interview last night on NPR and how well she spoke about her role as Patsy in 12 Years a Slave. And, but I'm also thinking about how the film is acted by non-Americans. How well directed, you know, even the evil plantation or who he was, he's not American either. And so there's this interesting thing about being able to perform blackness and perform whiteness better than those who've actually had to live with it or create it and reject it and re-make it, you know? And it's so close that maybe an outsider does it better, you know, on screen, that is. I mean, but if we go back in history, our independence as African nations are linked in every which way you want to think about it, to the civil rights, to what was going on here, to Pan-African-Africans in the U.S. The freedom fighters of the black nation in America informed our theaters and the languages went back and forth but we wouldn't have figured out, you know, a lot of what we needed to figure out. Marcus Garney's documents were read by the mama by the Kenyan freedom fighters and they understood, oh my God, this is what we need to do. And so this brotherhood, this sisterhood, this problematic family that has been torn apart is still trying to figure itself out and I think it's, we're doing it through our work but I think it's still, it's still difficult because nobody wants to be told what they are. Now I think, you know, it comes out of this history of struggling from my perspective at least within the United States. Black Americans think that that space was not only presented to them but then needing to actually coalesce for a whole series of reasons and that I'm very interested in how people interact with that space and as someone who writes about blackness, that is, you know, like the already inherent antagonism and challenge with this project that tends to conflate identity and I think that when you are an artist or an individual who is all about pushing bounds, there is a resting with that. So I think it becomes about how do we not, how do we avoid that sedimentation and that kind of narrowing vision and aspects to come to the fore but while still being very clear about the real social and political then inform lived experience and aesthetics. With that maybe we can go to Q&A. I just want to first express appreciation for the dialogue I've ever seen both of your work. My question is going to be more about the show upstairs, I won't get you but I do want to first say I appreciate your last comments because after all this country was founded on the slavery of African people and the system we live under capitalism was founded on the slavery of people all over the world and that's the financial foundation of the system and I guess I should say my name is Andy Z and I'm the spokesperson for revolution books that were about getting rid of this entire system that gives rise to the objectification of women and subjugation of people around the world. I wanted to ask, when going through the show there was a little piece in a glass case that had a little line written on the bottom that struck me quite deeply. It said in your mind you envision yourself a butterfly but you still find yourself on your knees and you wrote that in small print on the bottom of the drawing I said well in a certain sense I felt that it encompassed a lot of the show because these images are soaring in their beauty and they're also fierce and full of rage and reduces coming out of people's heads and yet when you get close to them you see these sort of horrific images of the objectification of women as well as fantastic animals and other things and I just thought that there was a metaphor there for the, and I don't want to put my words in your intention but I thought there was a metaphor for the work as a whole that was sort of where we live and I know it's just briefly, revolution books this is what we're about is how do we actually get up off our knees and we have a way to do that new understanding of communism but we are, we're trying to get people off their knees where they really can be the butterflies in their soles so I just, but what did you mean by this and am I just reading all my shit into it or is this really where you know you're living I thought it was too much You have to read all your shit into it but it's good it's no, it's good to read your shit into things that's what it's about, you know that's what it's about you know, you're pointing out definitely things I was thinking about when I'm working in my sketchbooks I have to do with the very private colonizations and the shackles within us you know and what holds us down and what we like to act and pose like we are versus what really is going on in our lives you know, but for me it was also I've had a peculiar journey in terms of my immigration status so for a long time I dealt with this issue through imagery and metaphor and this notion of being able to travel was a burden and a dream for me for a number of years I forgot to say that Cuddy was actually done at the border from the US and Mexico so I was also interested in border issues and the notion of what a border is and this line that is cut by nations by patriarchy, by capitalism and how fake it is and how if you go up in the sky you don't see these borders in fact they mean so little but they hurt so much you know they prevent so many things from happening and so this cutting was done at the border I was cutting the border but I was cutting to enact this violence and to enact the beauty of work which is what I did for the years that I was able to travel so I was thinking about that idea the notion of being free in my mind and then not being able to move but also in many ways in many regards I was also talking about the larger kind of story that I think you know we are all caught in we are who are trying to kind of deny some of these you know institutions and I guess oppressive you know conglomerates you know we are powerful and powerless all at the same time trying and working at things together to get us out of this place because we all know it's not a good place we're in and we're better than we understand so it's that kind of thing but my sketchbooks are very very therapeutic and so a lot of things that happen in my sketchbooks are a stream of consciousness I kind of just like a writer would sort of just let the words flow I do it those drawings with the hope that what will come out will tell me what I mean because I can see my damage and my issues and my obsessions and my line you know my line also tells me how I'm feeling how I strike the page with a pen and the strength the elegance, the lack of the confidence I see things in my line that tell me what I need to work on that was a question how did she walk on this? Hi, thank you both for this conversation this incredibly refreshing and empowering to hear your own processes as artists so you both have spoken a lot about your African identities as well as how your identities were shaped in your art kind of developed here at Estates so my question is for you I'm curious to know if you have taken and shared your arts back home on the Consnip and in particular the places you come from and what that experience has been like for you Yes, Africa is really important to me and I make it a point to spend as much time as I can working there either teaching, choreographing and infrequently performing but when I have performed it's been phenomenal a great deal of concern about why my hair is so short because there's also a tradition where short hair is only worn because there's bereavement somebody has died and so there's this kind of concern about that there's always a great deal of concern about the actual gestures that I am doing in my work because lo and behold and most parts that I have performed on the east coast of Africa in Kenya, Nairobi in Tanzania, Zanzibar on the west in Senegal in Congo people actually get the coast they get what I'm saying most people here they sort of oblivious they may kind of give a hint that something is afoot but they don't really know what it means exactly but you know opening your crotch is just cussing somebody and people get that like immediately so there's much ado about why I'm doing that so I really find why do you do that I like to cuss to do all the things that I couldn't do I mean you have to understand that I grew up in a very very normal household where you could not say a bad word to anybody ever and so the oppression of that I couldn't wait to be able to cuss yeah so it is you know working by any means necessary absolutely vital to me gives me life gives me energy gives me real because also most Africans really really understand the body so no matter how abstract the work is they get it it's good or it's bad you know and there's lack of polite which I think most performers would really appreciate you know that you get an instant understanding of whether your work is going anywhere or not hi thank you guys for being so lovely and encouraging me to continue making my own artwork my question now is to do with your definition of culture when you redefine your Africaness so I wrote it down so I make sure I say everything I want to say you identify Africaness with the culture you're raised in so what would you have to say for the African American children who are already three or four generations and they can't identify with the culture of their own I know it's a good question but I was thinking about it in your speech I'm not sure I understand the question but yeah I totally disagree but I think the African American children you're talking about are being raised into a culture there is a culture called African American because there is an American culture why deny that? no it's not denying that not at all an offense I'm just saying like it's a no way to be an offense but you too women come from Africa so you can identify with the culture of upbringing but you feel prided and I just feel like as a second generation Puerto Rican American I have a sense of culture as well and I have a sense of people have lost that am I offending? no I would just say that there are endless reverberations I could sit here and go through Zora's characteristics of Negro expression and you would see you should check it out but it's literally so much of this work and writing has already been done and not to mention in terms of tracing what's there in terms of black American culture we can just take the black and say American culture it's like they're inherently intertwined they're not distinct things so Robin Kelly gave this talk in February where we were talking about surrealism and because I'm obsessed with blacks I called it black surrealism and he literally traced starting at the blues he didn't even need to go back to the canonical art historical history of surrealism in paragraphs he said let's start with the blues I then blew it up or I worked out what it is about these kind of images of women bothers me that has marginalized them this beautiful body that creates continuously that is always changing that is always producing why is it so vilified that the nakedness has to fall into pornography and the trenches and that its clothingness is what we prefer to see if it's a particular shape particular color so I draw out of these very sometimes cheap easily thrown out in and away references and then from there I go larger if I need to and I create these larger drawings that I use to temper the backdrop of the larger collages and by that point the hand is moving in a different way because I'm not doing this I'm doing this and that movement in actual fact affects the way those bodies look and that elongation that you see is not frivolous it comes out of the love of making that mark longer and that body encapsulate and hold the eye go to when I make these larger works you know my performance envy and my dance envy comes out of that because I want to see these things be what I perhaps wanted to be but also I know that they can move that they are free and free in that way that they are in their own roles and then I start to create a narrative out of what's in front of me as opposed to what I originally started off with and that is where I start to act out and persuade this body to accept all of these different bits and pieces that are not anything to do with the natural body so I use collage almost like a paint brush but I also use it to antagonize I use it to draw the fewer in the eye to make tons of misconceptions clear like why do we have this fascination with facial features in this particular way why do we have this fascination with proportion with melanin with all these things come alive and that remove melanin in order to talk about it I exaggerate features in order to to I guess draw people who are easily drawn weird direction out there people are so fascinated by full lips big lips that's an African lip why why is that become for some reason now the most coveted kind of mouth after it's been so long filified so all that happens and then and then eventually I go down and get help but that's the way I go and then with my sculpture it's about creating an object that is interesting to make because I think one of the things I like to think about when I'm watching someone make an artwork or when I'm making an artwork is that I'm enjoying I get lost in it I get lost in your work I really appreciate and bring my own shit to it and enter it you know with sculpture I create something I love the movement the way it makes my hands feel I'm a tactile person my people are former people maybe that's what it is we mold the earth and we create food so I like that kind of work and I physically do things I don't try to work it all out in my mind first I let my mind be my entire body and then I create these sculptures and if I need help I have a wonderful studio assistant to help me make things in multiple so that's why the football is 300 of them I originally made 30 of them so that's my process in a nutshell well the question is about filmmaking though right no I just said I wanted one oh okay well excuse me get out of this bad one you know it's just mysterious it is with you the whole time and it is changing every single minute so I think the process of living of being in a silent body daily with its aches and pains and the whole range of the physical thing is in itself a very important process how do you feel when somebody touches you what does longing look like, feel like what does hunger what is joy I try to just work from being in my body being alive as opposed to a dancer must present something or it must look a certain way that bored me instantly you know as I entered the sort of professional dance, maybe you was instantly bored to tears by you know just a line that's supposed to hang there and not say anything back to me so you know I'm grappling with my with myself and I have to say I'm honestly fascinated and as the body gets older and experiences accumulate there is just so much there is just so much to explore and to understand what is a band what is you know how long can you go and what does that mean you know how long can you go I'm just interested in very simple things here now and you inhale air you bring space inside you know we're all breathing the same air so in a way we're sharing so much you know what does that mean I know this kind of sounds California and stuff but it is kind of those are the things that matter to me now when you embody humanity being alive while performing everything else is kind of irrelevant and bores me to tears that's my process so I'm being told that we have to wrap up but I see all of these people with questions so I have again privilege of moderating and you would just anyway what I'm going to suggest is that you each say your question and that these ladies decide what they're going to respond to so you go you start and we will go down here how could making art facilitate equity okay you go so I wanted to ask about your work I've been studying, I'm a British born now studying in New York and I've been studying the idea of utopias a lot and how different groups in the African diaspora have created their own utopias I found it very difficult to find a utopia that accurately addressed and so on don't provide a solution for black female identities so I wondered in your work how do you create new imaginaries new spaces which reflect your multiple identities and multiple thematic resonances of your work okay so she's asking about utopia though mine's more of a comment but I don't know if you're over that I would stand at that right now can you think about making it a question and I'm going to say no me? yeah what's your question my question has a lot to do with you talked about reconstructing and finding an identity that allows you to be who you are and what I find with a lot of artists African art especially women are only able to be ourselves outside of Africa and so much more than just having an art in galleries all over the world are we actually able to reconstruct ourselves again and live and actually be able to survive in Africa considering all the plays that women go through in Africa especially in the mountains beautiful okay I just wanted to access artists do you think it's important to find a medium or do you think how do you start from something that's having artistic tendencies to actually finding a medium do you think it's important to find a medium or do you think how do you start from just thinking of something to create something can you guys talk about the ways that you might identify or not identify with queer and transgender aesthetics very good I would like a given privilege as an moderator I want that answer with being female I'm wondering if working with the body as your subject and also in some cases as your medium if that's helped confirm gender identity mess with gender identity if it's been at all helpful or if it's been more problematic if you move more easily in your body through the world having major art sorry last one my question is about something related to language and communication and how you navigate both having to speak in the language of power and at the same time contesting that and I had a question about sanity and insanity and how that kind of plays out within this motion of the language that you bring to your art I don't know if that makes sense you meant sanity, sanity the storm sanity, insanity so I'm going to do a mashup ok what do you want to take I wish I could take all of them because they are all really fascinating and um yeah but if I had to just take one I think the the reality of that that I became the artist that I am outside of Africa is kind of like really close to my heart because that's something that I am wanting to change you know I want the acceptance at home I need that and so I think the work that I'm making daily is going back home you know but I also have to say that um most artists are themselves outside of their own homes too and I think that answers the queer question too I think that answers the I think that answers the insanity question too