Monday, November 7th, 2020, 7pm
Infinite Iteration
Nontsikelelo Mutiti in conversation with Students of the CCC RP Theory Fiction seminar of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD–Genève.
HEAD – Genève, Boulevard Helvétique 9, 1205 Geneva, seminar room CCC, salle 27, 2nd floor
The talk is already available on our Youtube channel.
Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Pain Revisited, still, 2015 © nontsikelelomutiti.com
For the Second Public Seminar, Kodwo Eshun, Nontsikelelo Mutiti and students at CCC discuss Mutiti’s ongoing concern with the formal implications of the histories and contemporaneities of South, Central, West, East and North African material cultures with reference to the technological aesthetics and aesthetic technologies of Afrodiasporic hair braiding. Mutiti’s elaboration of the implications of African women’s braiding practices as a rule based algorithmic process constitutes a far-reaching reconfiguration of the normative understanding of coding. Mutiti’s work provides a methodology and a vocabulary for a profound rethinking of the technicity of the digital by way of the aesthetic sociality of black women’s art that simultaneously elevates the generative labour of black women’s aesthetics to the open futurity of infinite iteration.
Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwe-born interdisciplinary artist, graphic designer and educator who studied multimedia art at the Zimbabwe Institute of Digital Arts and graphic design at the Yale School of Art. Nontsikelelo Mutiti is currently Assistant Professor in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia and will be an Artist in Residence at the DAAD Programme in Berlin in 2021. Nontsikelelo Mutiti’s practice traverses the boundaries of fine art, design and public engagement concerned with the form of print and the implications of publication as a time-based medium.