Radical Encounters | Perspektiven des Afropäischen

Radical Encounters, Afropean Perspectives, with John Akomfrah, Mohamed Bourouissa, Johny Pitts, and with a performance by Jasmine Tutum

Opening: Thur 5 May 2022, 7 pm, E-WERK Foyer

Hip-Hop and Afropean Identity, Teddy Smith, Freiburg singer and former rapper, in conversation with Mohamed Bourouissa and Johny Pitts I Hip-Hop

In his book, Afropean Johny Pitts tells the histories of Black Europeans, as he himself journeys through Black Europe. Driven to assert his own plurality, he encounters positive lived interaction between the cultures of Africa and Europe in the streets of European cities. It is a journey in search of what it means to be Afropean, where being Black participates in shaping a general European identity.
For this African-European path, the reappraisal, documentation and dissemination of the long-ignored history of Black Europeans is a necessary one. Pitts, like James Baldwin, believes that a reconciliation with the truth is the best way forward for every human being, regardless of ethnicity, in keeping with Frantz Fanon's Fanon’s conviction that “subjugation was just as mentally damaging for the subjugator as the subjugated” (Pitts 2019: 300).

The exhibition Radical Encounters, Afropean Perspectives addresses the urgent questions of a joint Afropean path in debate with the films, photographs, installations of John Akomfrah, Mohamed Bourouissa, Johny Pitts and a performance by Jasmine Tutum.
For all of these artists, Fanon’s notion that every generation has its obligation is important in order to create common future.

Film installation: John Akomfrah, Transfigured Night: Galerie I, GG-E-WERK

Exhibition: Mohamed Bourouissa, I lost My Name: Galerie II, GG-E-WERK

Outdoor Installation: Johny Pitts, Afropean Express: Travels in Black Europe: Rotteckring 14-16, Freiburg, can be seen from 5.5.-13.6.2022 at Rotteckring 14-16 (section between Trattoria Tizio and Colombi Hotel) in Freiburg.

Performances: Jasmine Tutum, Voice is Vision: Fotoecke, Bildhauerhalle E-WERK
Thur 5 May: 9 pm
Fri 6 May: 9:30 pm I Sat 7 May: 9:30 pm
Sun 29 May: 9 pm I Mon 30 May: 9 pm, As part of the Freiburg Theatre, Dance and Performance Festival
Fri 10 June: 9 pm

John Akomfrah lives and works in London. He is a respected artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics, often exploring the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, whose film works include Handsworth Songs (1986), The Unfinished Conversation (2012) or Peripeteia (2012). Since 2015 he has premiered numerous multi-screen film installations such as Vertigo Sea (2015), Purple (2017), Precarity (2017) or Mimesis, African Soldier (2018). In 2019 he presented Four Nocturnes at the Ghana Pavilion during the 58th Venice Biennale.

Mohamed Bourouissa, born in 1978 in Blida (Algeria), lives and works in Paris. Bourouissa describes contemporary society implicitly, by its contours. With a critical take on the mass media image, the subjects of his photographs and videos are people left behind at the crossroads of integration and exclusion. Unlike false simplistic media constructions, the artist reintroduces complexity into the representation of the margins of hypervisibility. Bourouissa is internationally present with numerous exhibitions. His video installation Pas le temps pour les regrets was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2018 and in 2020, he received the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

Johny Pitts, photographer, writer and broadcaster lives and works in London. He
grew up as the son of a white British mother and an African American father in Sheffield, in the north of England. In his book Afropean: A Journey through Black Europe (Penguin Random House, 2019) he describes his journey through Europe to better understand his own identity and that of the many Black communities on the continent. Afropean was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding and the European Essay Prize in 2021. Pitts is the inaugural recipient of the Ampersand / Photoworks Fellowship.

Jasmine Tutum, performance artist and dub poet, born in Tokyo and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, lives and works in Freiburg / Germany. Tutum studied art history and photography.
In Voice is Vision Tutum explores the possibilities of visual poetry to create alternative visions of Blackness. She combines video installation, research, performance, poetry, spoken word and vocal experimentation to create room for transcultural identities spanning Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and Europe.

Supported by Stiftung Kunstfonds, Neustart Kultur, und Institut Français, Bureau des arts plastiques Institut français Deutschland

Johny Pitts outdoor installation, Afropean Express: Travels in Black Europe: in cooperation with Forum on European Culture, Amsterdam.