Common Ground#833
The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity
Featuring Joan Kee, Kodwo Eshun, and Anjalika Sagar, with Jennifer Nelson
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
This event is produced by The Brooklyn Rail. Learn how you can donate ✨🌈
Rail Editor-at-Large Joan Kee joins writer Kodwo Eshun and artist Anjalika Sagar for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Jennifer Nelson.
In this talk
Joan Kee
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
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.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Jennifer Nelson reading.
Jennifer Nelson
Jennifer Nelson is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Harm Eden (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). They are an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and will join the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in the fall. For the academic year 2023-24, they will be a Hilles Bush Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.