Could an art experience be considered an institution? What is the legacy of an experience which deliberately refuses conventions on art project making to engage with a more critical social dialogue?

Founded in 1974 in Dakar, Senegal, the artist collective Laboratoire Agit-Art aimed to agitate the existing institutional framework, to question the tenets of Leopold Sédar Sengor’s Négritude, and to encourage artists to adopt a critical approach toward their practice. At that time, Dakar was a setting where political consciousness was exercised, and artist collectives such as Laboratoire Agit-Art went beyond the aesthetic experience to critically promote the development of cultural and artistic endeavours, whose goal were to blur disciplinary boundaries and to propose the experience of a ‘total art’ powerfully influenced by vernacular cultures and languages.

This symposium uses Laboratoire Agit-Art’s modus operandi, and particularly its uses of performance, as case study to reflect on the current presence of cultural platforms and artist collectives in Africa, which uses disciplines such as performance, visual art, music and art in the public space seeking to engage with socio-political concerns affecting their immediate environment. 

Speakers Elizabeth Harney and Souleymane Bachir Diagne explore Senegalese modernism and Negritude as a philosophical term and as a national cultural policy. In the afternoon session introduced by Tate Modern Curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, Jan Goossens discusses the trans-disciplinary collaborations ofConnexion Kin, a Kinshasa-based performing arts festival organised by the KVS. Lastly, Neo Muyanga introduces the platform, the Pan-African Space Station in a music-lecture.

Schedule

10.00–13.00

Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Elizabeth Harney
Clementine Deliss

Break

14.00–18.00

Elvira Dyangani Ose
Jan Goossens
Neo Muyanga

Biographies

Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York. His areas of research and publication include History of Philosophy, History of Logic and Mathematics, Islamic Philosophy, African Philosophy and Francophone Literature.

Clémentine Deliss

Clémentine Deliss is director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Deliss’s interests include bridging mechanisms between artists working in different parts of the world and curatorial modalities beyond exhibition. She has edited the journal Metronome and curated the ground-breaking exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1995.

Elvira Dyangani Ose

Curator International Art, Tate Modern, Supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc. She is an art and architecture historian, currently completing a PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, New York. She is as well Artistic Director of Rencontres Picha. Biennale de Lubumbashi 2012/2013, the third edition of the Biennale.

Jan Goossens

Jan Goossens is artistic director of KVS, Royal Flemish Theatre, Brussels, which aims to make an artistic contribution to the intercultural city of the future. KVSactivities in Africa include supporting artists and organising the Kinshasa-based performing arts festival, Connexion Kin, founded in 2005.

Elizabeth Harney

Elizabeth Harney is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, University of Toronto, where she teaches modern and contemporary African and diasporic arts. She is the author of In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 (Duke 2004).

Neo Muyanga

Neo Muyanga is a composer, librettist, musician and founder of the Pan-African Space Station, a music platform on the internet and in venues across the African world, streaming cutting edge music live online 24/7. His operetta, The Flower of Shembe, premiered to critical acclaim in South Africa in 2012. Muyanga tours widely as a solo and ensemble performer.

Credits

Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Curator International Art, Tate Modern, Supported by Guaranty Trust Bank, and Catherine Wood, Curator Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate Modern, in collaboration with Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Commissioned and produced as part of Corpus, new collaborative network for commissioning performance-related work co-founded by If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, Playground (STUK & M), Leuven and Tate Modern, London (as part ofBMW Tate Live). With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

BMW Tate Live is curated by Catherine Wood, Curator, Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate and Capucine Perrot, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.

BMW Tate Live is a partnership between BMW and Tate, which focuses on performance, interdisciplinary art and curating digital space