THE EUROPEAN CURATOR AND THE SENEGALESE DIASPORA ARTIST

Film screening followed by a debate with: Mansour Ciss Kanakassy (artist, Berlin), Kerstin Pinther (art historian/curator, FU Berlin), Christian Hanussek (artist/curator, Berlin), Daniela Swarowsky (ISOE curator, ZMO Berlin)

Our Foreign Agenda: The European Curator and the Senegalese Disapora Artist is a video-documentation of a lecture performance realized by Daniela Swarowsky and Mansour Ciss Kanakassy followed by an open discussion held at the DakArt OFF during the DakArt Biennale in May 2012. This performance was planned to be a self-deprecating satire, a fictitious dialogue between an African diaspora artist (represented by Ciss), and the Berlin curator Daniela Swarowsky, with the aim to provide an occasion to reflect about the international and local art scene, the role of Europe within them, and to gauge mutual clichés and imaginations of the "Other." However, the actual performance took a different turn and quickly departed from the script of an ironical dialogue between Swarowsky and Ciss into an emotional and at times heated discussion between Ciss and the audience about the role of artists and the meaning of art in the conflictual field between global entanglement and national rootedness. With the shown film as starting point, Christian Hanussek will explore the European concept of art from an African perspective.

all photos (c) André Wunstorf