How We Get Free is a title taken from Keeanga-Yamatha Taylor’s book that reflects on the impact of the work of The Combahee River Collective, a group of black feminists, who put out a much quoted statement which is often said to be the foundational document of intersectional feminism. Drawing on this statement and her interest in Decolonial methodologies Barby will explore understandings of liberation and decoloniality in artistic and curatorial practice. She will touch on knowledge production, institutional interventions, memory work, ideas of revolution and emergent strategy and how these idea are explored by artists and institutions.
Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator and educator who’s work explores place and identity through creating situations and spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and reenactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing. Asante’s recent projects include; The South London Black Archive (Peckham Platform/ Tate Modern) a collecting project mapping black music and memories in South London, through an invitation to audiences and local people to create that archive together. Baldwin’s Nigger RELOADED (Iniva, Nottingham Contemporary, Framer Framed/ Art Rotterdam) with the London based collective sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, using Horace Ove’s 1968 film Baldwin’s Nigger as a start for a contemporary reading of Baldwin’s provocation, through a reflective re-enactment ritual of transcribing, rewriting and re-staging the original event.
