May 3, 2023
Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago
In conversation with not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s, the Smart Museum of Art screens the Otolith Group’s 2018 cinematic collage Nucleus of the Great Union. The film reimagines the digital afterlives of novelist Richard Wright’s photographs as he traveled throughout the Gold Coast (present day Ghana) where he witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, West Africa’s first mass socialist party, as it campaigned for independence from British rule.
After the screening, the Otolith Group’s Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun are joined by not all realisms curator Leslie M. Wilson and UChicago faculty Adom Getachew and Natacha Nsabimana for a conversation about the film and the significance of the photograph in post-colonial West Africa.
This program is co-presented by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, Logan Center for the Arts, and the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts, in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art and Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group