Africa, the African diaspora and the conventions of their representation have helped anchor thought and aesthetics in Europe and the world down the ages. Africa has perhaps been overshadowed or sanitised in the official narratives of the so-called “West”. Nevertheless, its presence and ideas endure in the art and archives that bear witness to our connected pasts and their varied constructions across time and place.

The 2023 anniversary event will continue to reflect on the audacity of memory, imagination, and aspiration, with which cultural producers have inscribed African and African diasporic bodies, politics, and cultural styles in Europe and the worlds that it touched. Black Portraiture[s] – revisited in Paris — will meditate on the endurance of Blackness amid a perilous present shaped by controversies over migration and nativism.

The anniversary event of Enduring Blackness will examine the historical authenticity and rich array of Black imagery and its connections in the significant aesthetic conventions within European and global art forms. It will also trace the resounding resonance of the African diaspora in performative, literary and scholarly media – from film, music and opera to architecture, the textile arts and fashion, sculpture, learning, painting and photography – as these modes of expression engage with various audiences and common goods. Furthermore it will consider the history and politics of Black artistic and curatorial advocacy. Through wide-ranging conversations about the depiction of the Black body (and the body politic) in the West and around the world, the tenth anniversary of Black Portraiture[s] promises to continue its legacy of breaking new ground in the fields of art, African studies, history and cultural criticism.

As in previous years, this condensed version of Black Portraiture[s] promises to break new ground in the fields of visual studies, film, art studies, art history, African studies and cultural criticism.

Other round table titles include: Contemporary Artists Voices; Being/Becoming: the Act of Portraiture; Politics of Pleasure; The Grand Duke: Charleston, Chitlins and Champagne; Black Film; Writers from the Diaspora; Black Curators Matter; The Black Paris Archive: interrogating Colonialist Visual Culture in Public Space? and Black Paris: then and now.

Photo : Alexis Peskine, Power, 2017.

Moon gold leaf on nails, earth, coffee, water and acrylic on wood.195 x 250 cm.

Copyright Alexis Peskine. Collection Majed Halawi. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery.

Dates:  May 29-31, 2023

Location: MAY 29 – NYU in PARIS, 57 Bd Saint-Germain; MAY 30 – musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 37 Quai Jacques Chirac; MAY 31 – Little Africa // Virtual