Adiva Lawrence

I was introduced to the study of the arts of the African diaspora for the first time while doing my BA in History of Art and Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) a few years ago. I got passionate about it and wrote most of my papers on related topics.

I wanted to explore the effects of colonialism on the art production of formerly colonized regions, and how those still affect contemporary practices and daily life. I continued researching these questions while pursuing my Arts and Languages MA at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. I took classes in art history, art theory, anthropology and linguistics, which consolidated and broadened the knowledge that I had acquired in those fields while studying at SOAS. The phenomenon of art biennials multiplication throughout the world intrigued me particularly and this is why I decided to write my MA dissertation on the biennial of Bahia. In this dissertation I looked at the particular use of archival materials manifested in the project, and on the decolonial potential of artistic archival re-appropriations.

I wrote an article on this topic, “The Third Bienal da Bahia: Transgressive Archives”, published in the online academic journal Artelogie.

I will start a PhD in September at the School of Oriental and African Studies, on the decolonial potential of contemporary art in the Caribbean, under the supervision of the art historian Tania Tribe, specialist of the art of the African diaspora, and of the anthropologist Paul Basu, a specialist of archives and heritage.