Event information
Join us for a special live event to launch our new exhibition UNTITLED: Art on the conditions of our time. Commissioned by Kettle’s Yard, artist Barby Asante’s new performance To Make Love is to Create Ourselves Over and Over Again: A Love Poem for Audre will be live streamed online from the Kettle’s Yard House.
Following the performance, the artist will be in-conversation with writer Lola Olufemi.
FREE, booking recommended
Please note this event will take place online. Details of how to join the event will be emailed to all ticket holders nearer the time.
About UNTITLED
This exhibition brings together work by 10 British African diaspora artists with a focus on how their innovative practices ask important questions about some of the most important cultural and political issues of our turbulent times.
The exhibition title refers to the longstanding art historical convention of leaving artworks ‘untitled’ in order to encourage attention onto the works themselves, and eliminate reliance upon contextual information. Untitled asks viewers to examine the conditions of our time through the prism of Black British artists working today, without reducing the encounter solely to an exploration of Black British identity. By avoiding such over-contextualisation, the exhibition seeks to foreground these artists’ practices and show how they create platforms for audiences to explore the connections between art, culture and society.
About Barby Asante
Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator, educator and occasional DJ. Her work is concerned with the politics of place, space memory and the histories and legacies of colonialism. Asante’s work is collaborative, performative and dialogic, often working with groups of people as contributors, collaborators or co researchers.
Her artistic practice explores the archival, makes propositions, collects and maps stories and contributions of people of colour using storytelling, collective actions, and ritual, to excavate, unearth and interrogate given narratives, making works that consider migration, safe spaces to gather in cities antagonistic to ones presence and how one maps the self as a contributor to narratives of society, culture and politics. She resists the idea that the stories of “Other-ness” are alternatives to dominant given narratives, but for her these stories and narratives are interruptions, utterances, presences that exist within, that are invisible, unheard, missing or ignored. By making these narratives and stories visible, asking questions and making proposals she is interested in what these possibilities offer as we examine our present and envision our futures.
About Lola Olufemi
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, forthcoming from Hajar Press in 2021 and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
