The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity

Professor Joan Kee teaches in the History of Art at the University of Michigan and is a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at MoMA. Her forthcoming book, The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity, engages with Black and Asian artists and the vibrant worlds they initiate through their works and will be released by the University of California Press this April. Kee’s other books include Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (2019) and Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2014). An occasional public interest lawyer in Detroit, she is an Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002 by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. The group integrates film and video production with curating, programming, and writing. For Eshun and Sagar the morphological figure of the otolith operates as a kind of Black box for withholding intention, gauging impact, measuring expectation and calculating discrepancy. Approaching curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms, the collective has been influential in critically introducing particular works of a range of artists in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon. The Otolith Group currently has an exhibition at Galway Arts Centre (Ireland) and has had numerous solo exhibitions internationally.