Reflections on Black Materiality: A Series of Viral Lectures by The Black Aesthetic

The Centre for Emotional Materiality

Reflections on Black Materiality: A Series of Viral Lectures by The Black Aesthetic

Thursday, October 25, 2018
7:00 – 9:00 PM

The Black Aesthetic (TBA) will present three short performative lectures on black visuality and its energetic digital circulation. In the words of TBA,

Reflections on Black Materiality: A Series of Viral Lectures is a series of short performative lectures on black visuality and its energetic digital circulation. (The lectures) utilize film and digitally sourced video to explore the erotic legacy of slavery, emotional labor, algorithms, "niggerish rants," black mental health, the singularity, and black totality.

About The Black Aesthetic: The Black Aesthetic is a curatorial collective whose mission is to curate and assemble both a collective and distinct understanding of Black visual culture. Jamal Batts is a writer and doctoral student in African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. His work explores blackness, queerness, visual culture and the intricacies of sexual risk. Malika "Ra" Imhotep is a black feminist writer/root worker from Atlanta, GA currently pursuing a doctoral degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies and a Designated Emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her thinking engages black femme performance aesthetics and cultural production throughout the Black African Diaspora. Leila Weefur is an artist/writer from Oakland, CA and received her MFA from Mills College. Her work explores the complexities of phenomenological Blackness through video, installation, printmaking, and lecture-performances. Using materials and visual gestures to access the tactile memory, she negotiates the abject, the sensual and the nuances of language. She is the Audio/Video Editor In Chief at Art Practical.

Southern Exposure, in our commitment to prioritize artists’ voices and their self-definitions over power-conforming frameworks, values TBA’s thoughtful intention to allow for possible conversation around offensive and othering language.