Living with Ghosts explores how the unresolved traumas of Africa’s colonial past and its unfulfilled project of decolonization continue to haunt its present. The exhibition proposes that lens-based media, such as photography and film, possess a unique capacity to materialize the ghostliness of Africa’s postcolonial condition given the spectral structure inherent to such media. Thinking beyond the gallery as the primary venue for encountering exhibitions, Living with Ghosts will screen a selection of six single-channel artworks over the course of an afternoon. These screenings form a constitutive segment of the exhibition, and in their collective terms of viewership, aim to echo the poetic-political aspirations of Third Cinema – a revolutionary cinematic movement arising in Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s that sought to expand the decolonial imagination amongst its audiences. All the selected works, which speak to multiple regions within and outside the African continent, thematize and materialize this notion of ghostliness through audiovisual and discursive references to memory, trauma, archives, architecture, and landscapes.
New York City, NY; NYC