Sandrine Colard is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers University-Newark (USA), a researcher and a curator, based in New York City and Brussels (Belgium). Holding a Ph.D. from Columbia University (2016), Colard is a historian of modern and contemporary African arts and photography and she has lectured internationally (MoMA, Concordia University, EHESS, Wiels, Tate Modern, Bozar, Sorbonne, European Parliament) and she is the author of multiple publications (African Arts, Critical Interventions, Cahiers du CAP, Cultures et Musées). Her writings include contributions to volumes such as Sammy Baloji: Hunting and Collecting. A Research Project (Mu.ZEE, 2016), Photo Book Belge 1854-2018 (Hannibal / FOMU, 2019) and The Expanded Subject: New Perspectives in Photographic Portraiture from Africa (Hirmer, 2016), for which she was co-curator at the Wallach Art Gallery (New York, 2016). Colard was the curator of the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale, Future Genealogies: Tales from the Equatorial Line (Lubumbashi, DRC, 2019). Her most recent exhibitions include The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture. Photographs from The Walther Collection (Ryerson Image Center, Toronto, 2019); Multiple Transmissions: Art in the Afropolitan Age (Wiels, Brussels, 2019); and Congoville (Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, 2021) for which she co-edited Congoville: African Presence and Colonial Traces in Belgium (Leuven University Press, 2021). Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships (quai Branly Museum, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Ford Foundation, …) and prize (2016-2019 Roy Sieber Award for Best Dissertation ) She was a 2021-2022 Getty/ACLS fellow for her book project about the history of photography in the colonial Congo.

Osaisonor Godfrey Ekhator-Obogie is Research Fellow at the Institute of Benin Studies and Principle Researcher in Nigeria for the Digital Benin project. An expert on the cultural history of Benin and Edo-speaking people, he also acts as a tour guide for visitors to heritage sites associated with the Ancient Kingdom of Benin.

Patricia Hayes is the National Research Foundation SARChI (South African Research Chairs Initiative) Chair in Visual History & Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her research background is in African history, and she engages extensively with photographic archives and their methodological challenges to bring together history and aesthetics. She is co-editor of the volume Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History (2019); also the special issue on ‘Other Lives of the Image’ of the journal Kronos, Vol 46 (2020), and the recent edited volume Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa (2021).

Candace Keller is Associate Professor of African Art and Associate Director of Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Science at Michigan State University where she directs the Archive of Malian Photography (amp.matrix.msu.edu). Her research centers on the histories of photographic practice in Mali. She is author of Imaging Culture: Photography in Mali, West Africa (Indiana University Press 2021). 

Lebohang Kganye forms a new generation of contemporary South African photographers. Primarily known for her photography, Kganye often incorporates the archival and performative into a practice that centers storytelling and memory as it plays itself out in the familial experience. Her interest in the materiality of photography is ongoing and explored in a myriad of ways, through her use of the sculptural, performative and the moving image. While her work may resonate with a particularly South African experience; it critically engages with oral tradition as form and memory as a tangible source material.

She is currently doing her Masters in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University, South Africa. Notable awards include the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021/22, Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, 2020, Camera Austria Award, 2019 and the finalist of the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative, 2019. Kganye’s work forms part of several private and public collections, most notably the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania and the Walther Collection in Ulm. 

Ingrid Masondo’s involvement in the arts and heritage sectors spans more than two decades. Her practice has encompassed artist and project management, production management, curatorial and archiving work, within music and photography.

She worked at various institutions as – artist manager at Making Music Productions; archivist at the UWC-RIM Mayibuye Archives; researcher and curator at Badilisha Poetry Radio; photo editor and member of the editorial team at Chimurenga Chronic (in Cape Town) and as projects and curriculum manager at the Market Photo Workshop (in Johannesburg). Since 2015, Ingrid has been the curator of photography & new media at the Iziko South African National Gallery (ISANG) in Cape Town. Much of her focus at ISANG has been to support the presentation and acquisition of works by invisibilised artists and communities.

As a photographer, she has worked extensively on independent projects that focus on the body (habits, practices, performances). In recent years, she has focussed on how the personal interconnects with systemic and institutional pressures that include the family, the state and the market, amongst many others. Although plagued by issues of representation & authorship, power and circulation in the field, she still considers the moment of creating a photograph as magical – whether working alone, collaborating with others to make images or (re)creating these alone in the darkroom.

Steven Nelson is dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and Professor Emeritus of Art History at UCLA. Nelson has published widely on the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas and on queer studies. 

Temi Odumosu is an art historian, curator, and assistant professor at University of Washington Information School. Her research and curatorial interests are concerned with living archives and memorialization practices, with a current focus on colonial photography and its representation in Nordic collections, and ethical considerations surrounding the digitization of cultural heritage. She currently teaches on gender and race in information technology, and Afrofuturisms.

Giulia Paoletti is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the histories of modern art and photography in Africa. Based on over ten years of research, her book on photography in Senegal is forthcoming with Princeton University Press (2024).

John Peffer is a scholar of modern African art and photography and Professor of Art History at Ramapo College in New Jersey. His books include Art and the End of Apartheid (Minnesota, 2009) and (as co-editor) Photography and Portraiture in Africa (Indiana, 2013).

Z. S. Strother is Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia University (NY). She is author of Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art (2016); “Iconoclasms in Africa: Implications for the Debate on Restitution of Cultural Heritage,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol. 10 (3) 2020: 928-952, 985-988; “‘A Photograph Steals the Soul’: The History of an Idea,” in Portraiture and Photography in Africa, ed. John Peffer and Elisabeth Cameron, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013, 177-212.

10:15-10:30 Q&A

11:45-12:00 Q&A

2:10-2:30 Q&A

3:35-3:50 Q&A