Important Dates

Click the image to see the invite

Iwalewahaus and the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence are organising the second

Okwui Enwezor Distinguished Lecture

honoring the late art curator Okwui Enwezor.

This year the lecture that will take place on Wednesday, 30.11.2022 at Iwalewahaus will be held by Nantume Violet, who is an artist and curator based in Uganda. She will be joined by Salma Uche-Okeke who is the CEO of the The Prof Uche Okeke Legacy Limited (PUOLL)

COLLECTIVE MAKING: MULTIPLYING PERSPECTIVES IN CURATORIAL KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION & PEDAGOGY

The consequences of colonial divisions spill over into contemporary practices of
creation in the curatorial field. This lecture maps a way to overcome this
divide, to make oppositions fruitful by means of decolonial curatorial
transgression. The guiding metaphor is Kpaaza from the oeuvre of the late
Nigerian modernist Uche Okeke, a term that at the same time encompasses a
spring in Nimo/Nigeria, de/coloniality and utopia. It has been extensively explored in the ongoing exhibition and research project We Will Now Go To Kpaaza (curated by the late Ijeoma Uche-Okeke and Nantume Violet, 2022). In Kpaaza, the two approaches of Asele and UNDER GROUND converge in the exhibition but more so well as its making that emerges from a vast field of idiomatic expressions,fluidity and conceptual resources, which continue to reassert a reference of African art history and its potential to bring forth fresh pedagogical models in cultural practices. Through the quotidian practice/practice of collective making, we attempt to decontextualize the very foundations of art and knowledge production to root it into multiple entanglements, processes and heterotopic destinies.

• Okwui Enwezor Distinguished Lecture: COLLECTIVE MAKING: MULTIPLYING PERSPECTIVES IN CURATORIAL KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION & PEDAGOGY
• 30.11.2022,6-8 pm
• Venue: Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth
• Zoom Meeting details:Click to Zoom - Meeting-ID: 646 9269 0000 - Passcode: 203804

Nantume Violet - Image credits: Martin Kharumwa courtesy of Borderlands Art Ltd.

About Nantume Violet

 Nantume Violet is a curator and director at UNDER GROUND, a nomadic contemporary art space in Kampala, Uganda with extensive work experience and expertise in cultural productions, and curatorship.  Nantume has worked as a cultural producer for ten years and has collaborated with artists and curators in Eastern Africa, Ghana, South Africa, and Germany. Together with the late Ijeoma Loren Uche-Okeke she has curated the exhibition, We Will now Go To Kpaaza, which relates to the work and legacy of modernist master Uche Okeke, at the Iwalewahaus at Bayreuth University in Germany. She has also, together with Julia Gyemant, co-curated the exhibition, That Those Beings Be Not Being, at the Alpha nova & Galerie Futura in Berlin.

She has also curated several other works, including, Close, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa, and Indulgence at Goethe-Institute in Nairobi (both in 2018); Being Her(e), in  Luanda, Angola (2017); Zikunta: Gale of Human, a solo show by Wasswa August Donald (2016); and Heart of Darkness; a solo show by Christian Tundula, Cast a Light on Prejudice; a photography solo exhibition by Papa Shabani, and Together We Can, an installation by Hellen Nabukenya; at the UNDER GROUND Art Gallery in Kampala (2015). She has also curated the exhibition, Eroticism and Intimacy: Faces, Places and Paths, in Kampala and at the 2016 FNB Art, Joburg Art Fair in Johannesburg, South Africa. Nantume also organized the first ever major art auction in Uganda in 2015. She also chaired the curatorial committee of the Kampala Contemporary Art Festival in 2014.

She is a contributor to Artforum magazine, New York City and Contemporary And magazines Berlin. She currently serves as the lead researcher for an exhibition project, Affectionate Teeth of Time, which engages works and dispersed collections of Uganda’s modern artist Prof. Nnaggenda X. Francis. The research involves studying the artist’s works in Kampala, Nairobi, and Munich, the three places Prof. Nnaggenda studied and practiced. The project is curated with Julia Gyemant (Germany) and Dr. Lydia Ouma Radoli (Kenya).

 Nantume participated as a curator in the Global Crit Clinic at the third Àsìkò Art School in 2013 and attended TRANScuratorial Academy in Berlin, in 2017. In 2019 Nantume earned an M.F.A. from the HfBK Hamburg, in 2019. She is a recipient of the KAAD scholarship for Masters and PhD research and has also won a DAAD Prize for exceptional achievement by non-German students. Nantume was born in Masaka and is based in Kampala, Uganda.

Salma Uche-Okeke

About Salma Uche-Okeke 

Alongside her sister, late Ijeoma Uche-Okeke, SALMA UCHE-OKEKE has been actively ensuring that the Uche Okeke Legacy is sustained and grown. This has resulted in the family electing her to be the first CEO of The Prof Uche Okeke Legacy Limited (PUOLL) in 2019.

The late Okwui Enwezor

About the Okwui Enwezor Distinguished Lecture

The lecture, held annually, honors the late curator, historian and poet of note.  Each year, an artist or scholar, either an individual or a collective, will be invited to present fresh thoughts on matters of art, curation and politics in a lecture hosted by the Africa Multiple Cluster at one of its five locations (Bayreuth; Lagos, Nigeria; Eldoret, Kenya; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Makhanda, South Africa). The lecture series invites influential thinkers and makers who take to heart and advance the future of the curatorial and the collective in their work. 

• 30.11.2022,6-8 pm
• Venue: Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth
• Zoom Meeting details:Click to Zoom - Meeting-ID: 646 9269 0000 - Passcode: 203804