Time: Thursday March 26, 19:30 hrs.
Location: Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam
Admission: free

There is a growing body of work on the notions of ‘time’ and ‘temporality’. Being a central aspect of our existence, time of course has been subject to philosophical debate for centuries. But time is also used as a social and political device to structure our daily lives and our biographies. This lecture will discuss this latter aspect through an analysis of two art works by the transdisciplinary collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, “Good Stock” and “thewayblackmachine”. Both seek to produce alternatives to a developmental/ linear / progressive concept of time as it is embodied, for example, by the notion of New Media; alternatives that counter the time cycles nation states and materialize in diasporic archives. Can critical art projects develop different concepts of time, and this way displace – among others – colonial concepts, normative concepts of the human body, and address limits of representation?

Nana Adusei-Poku is Research Professor in Cultural Diversity at Rotterdam University and Guest Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of the Arts, Zurich. She was a scholarship doctoral student at Humboldt University, Berlin, working on the curatorial concept post-black in relation to contemporary Black artists. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Ghana, Legon; the London School of Economics; and Columbia University, New York. Among her recent publications are: ‘A Time Without Before And After’ in Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art & Research, Sternberg Press, 2014. Her research interests are: cultural studies, visual culture, black diaspora art history, postcolonial, critical race theory and queer of color critique. As part of an interest to expand the means of knowledge production, Nana Adusei-Poku is developing collaborative performance lectures, which use the realm of the aesthetic in order to counter classical academic notions of presentation and communication. Next to her professorship, she is currently working as curatorial fellow at Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Arts in Rotterdam on a show with the artist collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN, which will open on May 21st.

This lecture is organised by the Master Education in Arts, and part of the Seminar Digital Cultures taught by Levien Nordeman.

Image credit: Richie Adomako HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN, Still from Installation thewayblackmachine, 2014, Courtesy the Artist