An ambitious exhibition, showcasing how artists have depicted everyday Black joy in painting over 100 years, has made its way from South Africa to Switzerland.
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00:00Basically, it's a sprawling panorama of 100 years of Pan-African painting, starting roughly
00:25in 1920 to today, and it's a wide array of figurative imagination of the African continent
00:34and the African diasporas.
00:37The exhibition is entitled When We See Us, and it is derived of an American series created
00:44by the American director, Abba DuVernay, where it was called When They See Us.
00:49When We See Us is basically a reversal of the gaze, meaning that here black curators,
00:56black subjects look at each other, look towards themselves, and try to kind of take over a
01:03more positive notion of black subjectivities.
01:20So this exhibition was conceived by our colleagues at Sites MoCA in Cape Town, South Africa,
01:27and the initial ideas were about imagining an exhibition that would really center on
01:34a more positive notion of black subjectivity, on notions of revelry, joy, the quotidian,
01:43the everydayness, and to kind of bring a new form of imagining the black subject in
01:50our contemporary arena.
01:53It's always a good moment to look at overlooked histories.
02:13I think a good moment is now since we, in general, have to look at a more multi-regional
02:22situation worldwide and globally, and Africa hasn't only been a recent discovery of the
02:31art market, but also in terms of the major change in what is happening in black entrepreneurship,
02:41in ways black individuals are contributing globally to the way this world is going.
02:49So I think we've been more sensitized to take their contribution more seriously today.