I’m not doing too many things. I’m doing the same things in different registers - @NYUAbuDhabi / @nyuniversity professor Awam @amkpa talks about his own practice based on his mentorship by poet/playwright/activist/art collector Wole Soyinka.
The disunity of time and space.
What is residual is what we make of it.
What I do with my money is my business.
Challenging the notion of artistic copywright and ownership of antiquities. What does it mean when an artist collects art? Inter-artistic cross-references.
My curatorial practice is to stage and to ask questions about what is staged. @amkpa refers to how his early training as a theater director informs his curatorial practice.
Awam @amkpa’s Wole Soyinka exhibition was first staged at a museum at @Harvard, but when brought to Haiti, was restaged at an ethnographic museum where it re-engaged with vodou traditions.
A tiger does not have to boast his tigritude.
Listen more to the silent things you cannot hear.
The meaning of life is a quest for the truth. No revelation of ultimate truth. Soyinka on African religion.
There are no bad performances, only bad audiences.
It’s too easy to read/see the play once and think you’ve got it.
How do you keep people coming back?
Start with the curiosity for the provocation of what is strange.
Enter the Contact Zone. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_z…
The symmetries and assymetries are what matter. Transcultural communication. The encounter in a heterogeneous space is what matters. Acculturation is inherently oppressive. #cosmopolitanism
Shout out to the intercultural dialogue in the curatorial strategy of @LouvreAbuDhabi.
It’s not so much what it means, but what it does.
Prof Jonathan Shannon introduces a parallel way to think about art.
Geometry as a way of being in the world.
Intertwining questions about being, belonging and becoming.
His biggest critics are his former students.
Soyinka was “dumped” in the anthropology department at Cambridge because they didn’t know what to do with him. That’s where @amkpa @HenryLouisGates and @KAnthonyAppiah among others encountered him
Everything is subject to fragmentation. That’s what makes culture active.
“And where he wrote Death and the King’s Horseman.” adds @NYUAD_AH
What happens in a global asymmetry is that they often address the dominant culture and don’t look to the sides of them.
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