This talk considers what it is to be human, through the lens of an emergent research practice that has been tethered to affectively charged colonial collections, both on and offline. It focusses on encounters with specific objects and artworks that pose ethical questions about excavation, language, visuality, (dis)appearance, and witnessing. The talk also draws on reparative gestures and counteractive images offered by contemporary artists engaged in the ongoing reperformance of memory.
This lecture was held as part of the 2019 Holberg Symposium: "From Double Consciousness to Planetary Humanism" in honour of Holberg Laureate Paul Gilroy.
Biography: Temi Odumosu is Senior Reseracher at Malmö University, and curator. Her research is concerned with colonial archives/archiving, slavery and visuality, Afro-Diaspora art, performance of memory, and ethics of care-in-representation. She is the author of the award-winning book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes, White Humour (2017).