Black Archives Sweden welcomes you to Malmö konsthall for a keynote by acclaimed scholar Tina Campt, professor of humanities at Princeton University. The keynote event is part of Black Archives Sweden’s 3-day symposium (29th November – 1 December) for the exhibition Transmissions, showing at Skånes konstförening from 16 November to 19 January 2025.

Transmissions is a group exhibition that broadcasts connections across generations through photography, sound, video, installation, painting, and performance. The exhibition departs from Black Archives Sweden’s Family Archive collection, which is dedicated to sustaining diasporic life through experimentation, care, and communal activation. The Family Archive calls attention to aspects of Black history and the present day that are often overlooked by state archives.

As part of the keynote, Campt will offer reflections on Black visuality, Black family archives, and the Black Gaze. The keynote will be followed by a talk with curators of the exhibition Transmissions, Tawanda Appiah and Ulrika Flink, on the role of archives in shaping and affirming cultural, historical, and personal identities based on the research around the family archive. Other participants in the symposium: Madubuko Diakité, Lydia Östberg Diakité, Joanna Johnson, André Taylor, DJ VV.

Participants

Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University,  where she holds a joint appointment between the Department of Art and Archeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts. She is the author of five books including: A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021); Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017); Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004), and her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (Steidl, 2020). She is currently working on Black contemporary art and grief entitled, Art in a Time of Sorrow.

Tawanda Appiah is a Zimbabwean curator, writer and researcher based in Malmö, Sweden. His research-centred practice often revisits history to make sense of the contemporary milieu. He is the curator at Skånes konstförening, alongside his independent practice, and previously held the position of Curator of Education & Public Programming at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Appiah has curated several exhibitions, public programmes and interventions including FLIGHT (Malmö Konsthall, 2023) which featured works by Kudzanai Chiurai, Frida Orupabo and Eric Magassa. He was part of the 2024 jury for the Liljevalchs konsthall vårsalong. Appiah is an avid reader and sits on various boards including Paletten Art Journal.

Ulrika Flink is the Artistic Director of Konstfrämjandet Stockholm. As a curator, she seeks to explore the collective by merging artistic, theoretical, and political knowledge systems. This approach aims to facilitate contexts that create meetings where one can recognize themselves in others and, based on that insight, speak and act in the world. She has curated exhibitions both in Sweden and internationally, including the Nordic art biennial Momentum 9 (2017) and the Borås Art Biennial (2021) together with Amanprit Sandhu. Current projects include the Gwangju Biennale, Swedish Pavilion (2024) titled Inseparable Distance, co-curator for the Çanakkale Biennial in Turkey (2024), and curator for the exhibition Ingrid Pollard: Being in Landscapes (2024) in Stockholm. Ulrika has previously worked at Tensta Konsthall, Autograph ABP (London), Tate Modern, and Bonniers Konsthall, and holds a master’s degree in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.