A SHORTLIST OF ONLINE CULTURAL CONTENT FOR THE WEEK OF August 3, 2020
Read
"How do we bring into view the constancy of Black radical practice—a practice that has overwhelmingly fallen from view—and a certain lexicon of what constitutes the political, or the radical political, or an anarchist tradition, or a history of anti-fascism? In looking at the lives of young women, gender nonconforming and queer folk in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), one thing was absolutely clear: the practices of refusal—shirking, idleness, and strike—a critique of the state and what it could afford; and an understanding that the state is present primarily as a punishing force, a force for the brutal containment and violation and regulation and eradication of Black life."
Dr. Saidiya Hartman speaks about the continuity of the Black radical tradition, the insurrectionary qualities of Black life, and the “wild exercise of imagination” required to challenge the reigning order in Artforum.
Make
"Join us on Instagram to get inspired by works of art from The Met collection and experiment with different drawing approaches. Tag us at @metteens to be featured on the Met Teens Instagram account."
Visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Instagram account on Saturday, July 8 at 1 p.m. EDT for a virtual sketching session.
Watch: Live
"During a residency in The Kitchen’s building at 512 West 19th Street, Autumn Knight will create a new project to be viewed by online audiences. This project merges her practice of improvisation with new text, choreography, and sculpture that responds to the architecture of the space. Knight’s work often leverages institutional resources toward inclusion through live performance and immediacy. For this project, across three durational livestreams and a final video edit, she will treat the building as her collaborator, investigating its maintenance through performance. Taking up themes related to the anxiety and gaslighting of the current moment in the US, Knight exposes the illusory circumstances of performance as it transpires without an audience and explores the generative potential of disappointment."
Tune in on Friday, August 7 for Autumn Knight’s last livestream performance for The Kitchen. Free to view on Twitch, time to be announced.
Watch: Any Time
"Angela Davis makes her first national television appearance in an exclusive interview with Tony Brown, following her recent acquittal of charges of kidnapping, murder and conspiracy after the San Rafael courtroom shootout. Black Journal began as a monthly series produced for, about, and—to a large extent—by black Americans, which used the magazine format to report on relevant issues to black Americans."
Watch this interview with Angela Davis on the Black Journal archives.
Listen
"Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,—ugly, human."
Lamin Fofana translates W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) into sound art.
