Trembling Conversations
Published: 22 April 2024
2.00pm - 7.30pm, Friday 3 May
Friday 3 May 2024
Talks - 2.00pm - 5.00pm
Screening - 5.30pm - 7.30pm
Kelvin Hall Cinema
The Hunterian exhibition The Trembling Museum, co-curated with Professor Manthia Diawara and Dr Terri Geis, explores new relations between the African art objects in the Hunterian collection and contemporary art.
Talks
This special event invites contemporary practitioners to offer a range of new perspectives on the exhibition, and on the ideas of Martinican poet-thinker Édouard Glissant which are central to it. Glissant's concepts of 'relation', 'opacity' and 'trembling', developed through his own diasporic perspective on the modern world, have been influential in many contexts and across many forms of creative work. In this event, artists, poets, theatre-makers and creative writers will take The Trembling Museum as a point of departure for presentations, dialogues and new creative responses.
Contributors include: Tawona Sithole, Graham Eatough & Miek Zwamborn, Leo Robinson, Vanessa Onwuemezi and Jelena Sofronijevic.
Following these responses, there is a screening programme that has been curated to reflect and expand upon the themes of The Trembling Museum.
Screening
Manthia Diawara, In Search of Africa, 1997 (17 mins)
Diawara returns to his birthplace of Guinea to revisit his past and to track down his childhood best friend, now a sculptor making copies of traditional African masks for the commercial market.
Karen McKinnon and Caecilia Tripp, Making History, 2008 (9 mins)
A conversation between Édouard Glissant and his friend, the renowned poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Alberta Whittle, A Black Footprint is a Beautiful Thing, 2021 (11 minutes)
This film engages with the legacy of colonialism through an exploration of the shipworm. This seemingly insignificant marine organism inadvertently thwarted the progress of European imperialism by consuming the wooden structures of ships deployed in the colonization of the Caribbean.
Manthia Diawara, A Letter from Yene, 2022 (50 mins)
Filmed in the coastal village in Senegal where Diawara lives for part of the year, this film connects global changes (including climate change) to a specific place. The area was traditionally and primarily occupied by fishermen and farmers but has in recent decades been besieged by coastal erosion and uncontrolled urbanisation. The film explores these issues through dialogues with the community.
First published: 22 April 2024
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