“I See From This Perspective”: Curatorial Writings by Black Women and Women of Colour

This seminar series brings together artists, scholars, researchers and organizers from South Africa, Mexico, U.S., Iran, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Botswana, Peru and Sweden, to share the interdisciplinary, aesthetic and transcultural nature of Black Study. 

Maipelo Gabang, PhD student at SKH, in conversation with Mmabatho Thobajeane, curator

This publication brings together contributions by six black women and women of colour curators. To begin with the publication was conceived as the fulfilment of an assignment Professor Yomaira Figueroa prescribes to her grad students, which is to compile an anthology of contributions by women of colour in the grad students respective fields. 

The main title of the publication, “I See From This Perspective”, is borrowed from an earlier version of Diane Lima’s included text and her notion, therein, of ‘practice in perspective’. Her elaboration on this notion reveals that the curatorial, practised in perspective, is at once a matter of ethics, aesthetics and epistemology as well as a method of world-making. “I See From This Perspective”: Curatorial Writings by Black Women and Women of Colour fulfils Professor Figueroa’s assignment and, in so doing, reveals that black women and women of colour curators, practising in different contexts, ‘practice in perspective’ and enact the curatorial as a site for opening up to cosmologies other than that of Anglo-European Modernity. From their different socio-political contexts, they simultaneously refuse the myth of universality while at times tending to the contributions and lives of other black women, black people and people of colour to make the world anew. Alongside the texts are illustrations by Soban Moallim that interpret and reflect thoughts, themes and ideas in the texts. 

The publication takes inspiration from the Cite Black Women movement to invite the reader and other curators to engage seriously the curatorial contributions of black women and women of colour curators. In so doing, it begins an archive and platform for black women and women of colour’s curatorial contributions. 

This publication is part of a degree project within Curating Art, International Master’s Programme at Stockholm University. 

With contributions by Nana Adusei-Poku, Chandra Frank, Joana Joachim, Nkule Mabaso, Diane Lima and Alberta Whittle and Illustrations by Soban Moallim.