AGNES Program

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is an artist whose research-based practice resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining.

Workshop (for students)

This workshop is interested in exploring the ways that art can be used to create documents that recombine and resignify histories. By collapsing time and distance, film and video open up possibilities that can be particularly useful to colonized and displaced people looking to produce counter narratives or to defy their erasure. The conversation is rooted in an experimental, politically implicated, research-based approach to camera, sound and editing. We will watch and discuss works that examine architectural and natural spaces, and the layers of history that inhabit them, exposing their poetic and political implications. Participants will analyze their formal approaches to identify practical ideas that can support their own projects. Strategies like artisanal film development, mixing formats, manipulating biodeterioration, and multi-channel installation will also be discussed as tools to explore presence, absence, impermanence, intertextuality, and memory work. The group will also be invited to go on a walk together and practice some of the ideas from the workshop with their cell phone cameras in a group exercise.

Presented by Agnes Etherington Art Centre

Join us at the Isabel for a special film screening of Zina Saro-Wiwa’s video-performance Worrying the Mask: The Politics of Authenticity and Contemporaneity in the Worlds of African Art (2020). Following the screening, Saro-Wiwa takes to the stage for a talk and Q&A.

In Worrying the Mask, Zina Saro-Wiwa questions the authority of the museum and its outmoded colonial practices and shifts the restitution debate into genuinely radical new territory. She exposes the desires and limitations of the storytelling surrounding African traditional objects whether in the country of origin or in the country of display and goes on to ask whether an African object can represent a people at all or if they, in fact, have a life of their own. She suggests that our attempts to understand, explain and truly benefit from these works as a society may require a fundamental ontological shift.

Biography
Zina Saro-Wiwa is a British-Nigerian artist who lives and works between Los Angeles, the United Kingdom, and Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She has given talks and has shown works at biennales, museums and art fairs including Tate Modern, Frieze and Basel Art Fairs. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of African Art and Agnes Etherington Art Centre, among others. 

This program is made possible through funding from the Chancellor Dunning Trust Visitorship, Queen’s University.