US Participation Public Events
at Dak'Art 2004

As part of the US Participation in Dak’Art, a series of workshops, lectures and symposia will be organized from May 9 to May 11, 2004.

A Plenary Panel, entitled "Mega Exhibitions: Globalization and Contemporary Art," featuring Okwui Enwezor and Thelma Golden, will take place on May 9, 2004, focusing on the culture and politics of contemporary international art exhibitions and biennales. Okwui Enwezor, former Director of Documenta XI, will deliver a keynote address to which Thelma Golden, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, will respond.

Also on May 9, 2004, will be the premiere of Conakry Kas, Manthia Diawara's latest documentary on the intellectual scene in Conakry, Guinea after the cultural revolution.

On May 10, 2004, US and Senegalese artists, art critics and scholars will meet for a morning symposium to discuss the work of exhibiting artists and their relationship to cultural production in the West and in Africa. The first of the two-part panel discussion will feature Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons in conversation with Sally Berger, Assistant Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Selene Wendt, Curator at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway. The second panel will feature Pamela Z in conversation with George E. Lewis, musician and computer/installation artist.

On May 11, 2004, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons will give a slide-illustrated lecture at the Village des Arts, a longstanding influential art community in Dakar. Her talk will draw parallels between the traditional mediums of painting, printmaking and sculpture, and the contemporary practices of installation, video and performance. The lecture entitled, "The West and Beyond: Articulating Painting Practices Today," will begin with an overview of the practice focusing on technical innovations and ideas supporting painting at the turn of 20th the century. It will then focus on artistic production in American, European and Latin American centers from the late 1980s to the present. Campos-Pons's lecture will be followed by a dialogue with the Senegalese artists and art critics Alhadji Sy and Issa Samb, and the Rome-based US painter Stanley Whitney, moderated by Sylviane Diop, artist and technical consultant to Dak'Art.