We are excited to announce that Awa Konaté is the 2023 curator for South by South.
South by South is a quarterly film screening at the South London Gallery. The programme, which is now in its twelfth year, focuses on presenting bold and innovative cinema from Africa and the diaspora to audiences in the UK.
Awa’s selected films will focus on space, subjectivity, and movement. The programme will explore memory and how stories can connect specific places to wider communities, expanding on set ideas of history and geography.
Awa says “I’m honoured to have been nominated by Anthony Badu and the South London Gallery for the 2023 South by South curatorship. As a curator, my practice is particularly interested in issues of cultural knowledge, archives, memory, and multidisciplinary artistic positions, especially the socially engaged, that draw on the camera to rework, rearticulate, and expand horizons of Black aesthetics. I’m particularly interested in artistic practices that both undo and contest the visual modalities of anti-blackness and suspend cues to knowing.
Relatedly, my programmes, ranging from shorts, feature films, and experimental artist moving image, will gather past and present African continental and diasporic practitioners. Their work grapples with memory, space, and movement, to connect their respective geographies to the wider diaspora, thereby troubling and disrupting each locality’s linear historiography.
My curatorship for South London Gallery, reflecting on the radical history of African and diasporic filmmaking, will present an expansive public programme that connects, rejoins, and makes accessible the trans-national constellations of knowledge production through the artistic and political registers of Black artists.”
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About Awa Konaté
Awa Konaté is a curator, art consultant and founder of platform Culture Art Society (CAS) based between London and Copenhagen. Her practice makes curatorial interventions within the public and institutional realm foregrounding archival research and interdisciplinary frameworks of African/diasporic artists, with particular interest in lens-based practices. Konaté has developed and led on a wide range of international exhibitions and programmes for Serpentine Galleries, Barbican, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg to mention a few. She has lectured, presented at various panels, and her writings have been published in Third Text, Foam Magazine, Phaidon, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2023 catalogue, and more.