Underskog

Who Knows Tomorrow – this piece of worldly wisdom, heard everyday over large parts of Africa, provides the title for a remarkable project held by the National Gallery, for which it has invited five internationally acclaimed artists, whose work is primarily shaped by their African origins, to join together in creating a major exhibition in Berlin. Their works, completed and installed, for the most part, in prominent positions outside four of the National Gallery’s separate venues, will together serve to spark a dialogue over questions that are now more topical than ever before, thanks to the radical upheavals currently sweeping political, social and economic systems that had, until now, been considered unshakeable. These questions include: is uncertainty over the future now the greatest certainty we have today? Whose history needs to be told and faced up to now? What is art’s contribution to helping overcome (art) historical constructs, clichés and stereotypes?

So we’ve already had group exhibitions attempting to educate, explain and inform German and European audiences about contemporary African art. But here we wanted to make a project-specific exhibition that was not about “representing” Africa but consisted of individual artists’ meditations on the entanglement —the fraught historical and political relationships— between Europe and Africa.

With relation to KHiO’s “North/South” seminar on the 8th and 9th of March 2011- one of the keynote speakers will be Chika Okeke-Agulu, Assistant Professor at Princeton University.

Chika Okeke-Agulu (B. in 1966) is an Artist, independent curator and art historian with primary interest in contemporary art, but especially of Africa and its Diaspora. Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Archaeology and at the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University, USA.He has co-curated several exhibitions, including Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (1995), The Short Century (2001) and Who Knows Tomorrow (2010). Co-author, with Okwui Enwezor, of Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (2009) and co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.

Open Forum is a series of lectures, presentations, performances and conversations with artists, curators, theorists, authors, musicians etc. initiated and arranged by the Art Academy in Oslo. Open Forum usually take place every Monday at 19.00 in the Academy’s auditorium at Seilduken, Fossveien 24. Additional Open Forums might occur. The lectures are mainly executed in English and is ordinarily rounded up with questions and answers. The event is open for general public. Welcome!