Thinking through tenses and tensions in relation to the past conditional of Lisa Lowe’s "what could have been", alongside its relationship to Tina Campt's, Black feminist grammars of the future real conditional "that which will have had to have happened". They will be discussing The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, its inception, the work of building communities beyond borders and afterlives, not just of History, war and colonialism, but those afterlifes that speak to love, death, survival and the diaspora.

Speakers

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work explores the power of storytelling through video and sculpture. His projects are based on extensive research and community engagement, tapping into inherited histories and counter-memory. Nguyen extracts and re-works dominant, oftentimes colonial histories and supernaturalisms into imaginative vignettes. Fact and fiction are interwoven in poetic narratives that span time and place. The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019, the central film of this exhibition, is a four-channel video installation that envisions the memories and desires of descendants of the tirailleurs sénégalais, West African colonial soldiers who were among the French forces sent to combat Vietnamese liberation uprisings in the 1940’s. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, hundreds of Vietnamese women migrated to Africa with their children and their Senegalese husbands who had been stationed in Indochina. Other soldiers left their Vietnamese wives behind and took only their children, sometimes raising them without knowledge of their origins. Nguyen collaborated with members of the Vietnamese community in Senegal to write and stage imagined conversations with or between their parents or grandparents that highlight nuances in strategies of remembering. As narrators and actors, the voices of these descendants embody a historical conscience that challenges understandings of decolonising societies.

Dulcie Abrahams Altass is a British curator and art historian currently based in New York. Working across the fields of art, wellbeing and social change, she is studying for a Master's of Education in Mental Health Counseling at Hunter College (CUNY). From 2016 to 2022 Dulcie was part of the curatorial team at RAW Material Company in Dakar (Senegal) where she co-developed numerous exhibitions, public programmes and publications. Discursive projects of note with RAW Material Company include Kan jaa ta; From the shadow into the light (Bamako Encounters Photography Biennale, 2019), Condition Report 4: Stepping out of line; Art collectives and translocal parallelism (Dhaka Art Summit, 2020) the public program of the Sex Ecologies exhibition (Kunsthall Trondheim, 2021) and most recently RAW Académie 9: Infrastructure in collaboration with ICA Philadelphia and Linda Goode Bryant. Her work in Senegal, spanning almost a decade, has included research on diverse topics ranging from the country’s performance art history to the nexus of hip hop and contemporary art in the country, and her writing has been published in SUNU Journal, Art Basel Stories, Making & Breaking, ESPERANTO and Obieg. Dulcie has also been a member of Dakar artist’s collective Les Petites Pierres, and is a volunteer at Project EATS in New York.

Camara Taylor is an artist and - - - based in Glasgow. They tend to create still and moving images, texts, installations, events and discursive programmes that act as moments of stasis amidst sprawling research. Recurrent in the practice are: ambivalence; low frequency objection; mad methodologies; ontokinetics; spatial relations; ocean rumour; land/scape construction; and a playing with images/objects/happenings/utterances situated amidst black life in and outwith Scotland. Recent projects include backwash, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2022) ; a rant! a reel!, Cubitt Gallery, London; holus-bolus, 17th Edinburgh Art Festival;IMG_5917, with Sulaïman Majali, Artists’ Moving Image Festival and suspiration!commissioned by The Newbridge Project, Gateshead, and recipient of a 2021 Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival New Cinema Award. Camara has undertaken residencies at Cove Park (2021), Market Gallery, Glasgow (2020), The National Theatre of Scotland, Glasgow (2019) and Fresh Milk, St George (2015). They have participated in programmes including Satellites (Collective Gallery, 2020-2022); Curatorial Directions (MAC Belfast, 2019) and Constellations (UP Projects/ FTHo, 2017-18). Camara was a Committee Member at Transmission Gallery from 2016 to 2018 and Programme Coordinator of the Race, Rights & Sovereignty series at The Glasgow School of Art from 2017 until 2021. Currently they are a member of Collective Text.