Speakers: Denise Ferreira da Silva, Salah Hassan, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun (The Otolith Group)

Moderator: Sepake Angiama

Denise Ferreira da Silva is professor and director of the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Her academic writing and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present, and target the metaphysical and ontoepistemological dimensions of modern thought. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and editor, with Paula Chakravartty, of Race, Empire, and The Crisis of the Subprime (2013).

Salah M. Hassan is the Goldwin Smith Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture, and director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. Hassan is an art historian, art critic and curator. He is currently the director of The Africa Institute of Sharjah. He authored, edited, and co-edited several books including Darfur and the Crisis of Governance: A Critical Reader (2009), and Diaspora, Memory, Place (2008).

The Otolith Group is an artist collective founded by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. Their moving images, audio works, performances, and installations engage with the legacies and potentialities of diasporic futurisms; they also explore modes of temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation. Recent solo exhibitions include Xenogenesis at Van Abbemuseum (2019), Reconstruction of Story 2 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2018), and In the Year of the Quiet Sun at Casco (2014).

Sepake Angiama is a curator and educator, whose work focuses on the social framework and discursive practices. She was previously head of education for Documenta 14, where she initiated the project Under the Mango Tree: Sites of Learning, and head of education for Manifesta 10. She was a fellow at BAK Utrecht in 2017–2018. Angiama was co-curator of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial.