Contemporary Black female artists have reclaimed the everyday labor and domestic motions women have historically performed, as artistic gestures in their own right. For example, the ceramic and bronze sculptures of the African-American artist Simone Leigh have referenced vernacular processes like washing chores and needlework.
The Zimbabwean Nontsikelelo Mutiti has developed design motifs and installations inspired by what she calls the “technology of African hair braiding.” Or again, the artist Mary Sibande has a longstanding practice of revisiting the sartorial gestures of female domestic workers in (post-) apartheid South Africa.
This shared keynote address will pause to closely consider the poetics, politics, and radicality of such long overlooked micro-movements. We argue that by paying attention to such fleeting yet enduring physical gestures, artists re-write a haptic iconography of the Black female experience, as well as redefine media distinctions, making visible and palpable a history of personal and technical rooted in the African continent and its diaspora.
Taking as its focus the past and present entanglements of photography and textile in Africa, our address seeks to map genealogies of gestures that recent generations of artists have exposed. Already in 1974, in his watershed publication, African Art in Motion, Robert Farris Thompson argued for the fusion of form and movement in the arts of Africa. For Thompson, motion is not unique or exclusive to performance, but can be tracked in a sculpture’s volumes, and in the off-beat phrasings of strip-woven textile. More recently, Jennifer Roberts proposed “a new grammar” for understanding the art of print, by privileging its physical operations such as reversal, pressure, transfer, and contact.
Inspired by such framings, our address will consider artists such as Jess Atieno (b.1991), Belinda Kazeem Kaminski (b.1980) and Silvia Rosi (b.1992), who transpose archival photographs onto woven tapestries or as serigraph on canvas, or again, re-enact and twist the canonical African textile backdrops of traditional studio portraiture. Other artists, such as Sasha Huber, Monica de Miranda and Tuli Mekondjo, anchor their intermedial practice in the manouvre–and long history–of stitching using cotton threads and metal staples. In each work, the reproduced and staged motion—sewing, the head carrying of loads, embroidering—allow to conceptualize a history of photography and textile “in Black women’s hands.”
Sandrine Colard
Sandrine Colard is Associate Professor at Rutgers University-Newark (USA), and Curator-at-Large at the Musée Kanal-Pompidou in Brussels (Belgium). A specialist in African art and photography, her recent writings have appeared in The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2024), A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography (Tate, 2023), and Style Congo: Heritage and Heresy (CIVA, 2023). She has curated the exhibitions Recaptioning Congo (FOMU, 2022), Congoville (Middelheim Museum, 2021), The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture (The Ryerson Image Center, 2019), Multiple Transmissions: Art in the Afropolitan Age (Wiels, 2019), and the 6th edition of the Lubumbashi Biennale (DRC, 2019). Her book on the history of photography in colonial Congo (1885-1960) will be published by Duke University Press in the fall of 2026. Support for her research and writing include awards and fellowships from Aperture/Paris Photo; the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)/Getty; the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA); the Ford Foundation; the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) and the quai Branly -Jacques Chirac Museum. Currently, she is at work on an exhibition and book project about the relation between photography and textile in Africa in collaboration with Dr. Giulia Paoletti . She also prepares one of the inaugural exhibitions of the new Kanal-Pompidou Museum, An Infinite Woman: Black Archives in Two Acts (November 2026, Brussels, Belgium).
Giulia Paoletti
Giulia Paoletti is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia, and Visiting Associate Professor for the Fall 2025 in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the histories of modern art and photography in Africa. Her book Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840-1960 (Princeton University Press, 2024) was awarded the 2024 Photography Network Book Award. Her work has appeared in edited volumes and journals including Art History, Cahiers d’études africaines, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Art in Translation, Journal of African History, and Troubles dans les collections and African Arts. Support for her research and writing include awards and fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)/Getty; The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA); the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She has co-curated three exhibitions on historical and contemporary photography from Africa at the Metropolitan Museum, the Wallach Gallery and Dak’art Biennial OFF 2018. With Dr. Sandrine Colard, she is currently working on her second research project, an exhibition on the relation between photography and textile.