S out of the colonial prism

This symposium will emphasise questions about what it means to be a black scholar and artist today. As noted by Guinean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, who speaks of how black subjects need to commit class suicide in order to identify with the “deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong”. But this cannot be achieved by exiling themselves from the world that has shaped their consciousness and language, being a black African scholar often requires navigating a range of tasks set by institutional structures and social imperatives.

In convening this symposium, Black Mark hopes the larger question of whether or not black creative scholars can marshal the master’s tools to undo the master’s house will be raised. The culmination of the proceedings will be compiled in a publication that seeks to fill a gap in black creative studies.

It is worth noting that, although Black Mark is interested in expanding the conversation about visual arts to other parts of the continent, this needs to be thought through because countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda are light years ahead of South Africa in black creative studies.

This is partly because of the nature of South Africa’s art-historical narrative, where the arts have not only developed along racial and ethnic separatist lines but have also illustrated a number of indignities that are routinely enacted in arts conferences, talks, panel discussions and publishing projects. Even among those of us who have not lost our minds, all is not well. Even after performing all the rituals and following the protocols involved in one’s intellectual project, one is still exceptionalised, infantalised and exoticised.

Thando Mgqolozana, the founder of Soweto’s Abantu Book Festival, often recounts how the questions he is asked at literary festivals invariably leave him feeling like a curiosity because people don’t consider what he writes.

With all that said, progressive action and work by black visual artists and art historians have been unfolding consistently for decades. Although the archives of these histories remain largely beyond reach, because many public institutions are disorganised or in the hands of private collections, they are nevertheless captured.

It is in line with this history of progressive acts that Black Mark wants to position itself. The Collective is aware of the historical challenges of such collective endeavours. Few such initiatives, on average, exceed a five-year lifespan. This is perhaps a testament to how taxing the process of challenging and countering the colonial narratives can be while remaining true to the black project.

This contemporary moment offers us many possibilities. The advent of digital technologies and social networks has given us hope in imagining a different future. It offers opportunities to organise and co-ordinate this work in ways that veer away from individualised histories.

Learning from those who came before, this collective aims to author and archive to produce black representation that addresses black aspirations in the visual arts.

The Visual Arts Symposium comes at a time when debates about decolonisation have once again come to the fore. Although many black scholars have been doing “decolonial” work in one way or another, the term has become popularised to encompass a sometimes convoluted and contradictory meaning.

Decolonisation may not be at the centre of the symposium, but it is hoped that the debates and discussions will illuminate some of these contradictions and convolutions in a meaningful way to a wider audience than has previously been the case. — Black Mark Collective