A Black Aesthetic of Landscape

07.12.2022 / 18:30 – 22:00
With MADEYOULOOK

A conversation with MADEYOULOOK about their publication Menagano, an exploratory study on what might constitute a black landscape aesthetic. The publication responds to the political and historical context of the tradition in South Africa and lays out a set of questions and propositions informed by a contemporary community of practice as well as long-established black interpretations of landscape. MADEYOULOOK will be in discussion with South African artist, Nolan Oswald Dennis.
The conversation forms one part of a short series of discursive encounters in Berlin, which culminate in the presentation of an in-progress film work by the artists in March 2023. These encounters consider how knowing the land intimately and from within informs aesthetic imaginations of land that disrupt colonial understandings of the landscape tradition.

In English

Free Admission

daadgalerie

MADEYOULOOK is an artist collaborative between Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho. Their work takes as its point of departure everyday black practices that have either been historically overlooked or deemed inconsequential. In reworking and interrupting how we view these ordinary lived experiences, we are ‘made to re-look’ and question societal relations. MADEYOULOOK have considered subjects such as models of memorialisation of histories and oral traditions, black love and urban public space, hierarchies of knowledge creation and dissemination, and the socialities of land.

Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice explores what he calls ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. Dennis’ work questions the politics of space (and time) through a system-specific, rather than site-specific approach. He is concerned with the hidden structures that pre-determine the limits of our social and political imagination. Through a language of diagrams, drawings and models he explores a hidden landscape of systematic and structural conditions that organise our political sub-terrain.

Picture credit: documenta fifteen: MADEYOULOOK, Mafolofolo, 2022, installation view, Hessenland, Kassel, June 15, 2022, Photo: Frank Sperling