Phantoms of Promise

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. 

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian and Christian Rossipal

This Seminar is a part of the Exposition Ph.D Course.

Afrang and Christian will talk about their respective research and practice, as well as their joint work in co-curating the program “Phantoms of Promise”, as members of the collective Noncitizen. 

“Phantoms of Promise” was held as a gathering of poetry, screenings, and lecture-performances at SAVVY in Berlin during the summer of 2024. It was also preceded by earlier iterations at e-flux in New York, DOC in Paris, and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Sweden. The program was meant to attune those who attended to the “ghostly traces of dreams and aspirations.” For a migrant who has lost their family and friends or a home that will never come back, a type of phantom pain always returns – often across generations, inherited for decades or centuries. Not only does memory – or the memory of memory – return like a specter for those in exile, but the dominant image of the migrant is, as Sara Ahmed puts it, “a rather ghostly figure, haunting contemporary culture”. During the gathering at SAVVY, we listened and spoke near the figure of the phantom, as in both promised futures and the ghosts of returning pain. We considered the insidious and often broken promises of a better life and citizenship for the migrant, that echo across generations – as well as the specters of radically different futures that still are possible.

Christian Rossipal is a curator, filmmaker, and film scholar focusing on community archives, nonfiction media, and radical politics. Christian holds a PhD from New York University and currently runs the artistic research project The Black Beach together with Salad Hilowle, which critically explores the country’s colonial history in the Caribbean (with funding from the National Research Council of Sweden, 2023–2026). As a curator and editor, Christian has, among other engagements, been a programmer at the film festival CinemAfrica (2021–2022) and an editor of the large-scale video installation Towards the New Baroque of Voices for Manthia Diawara at the 34th São Paulo Biennial. Christian’s research is published in Film Quarterly, The Global South, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Routledge Key Issues in Cultural Heritage, among other journals and anthologies. He is a member of the collective Noncitizen.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian (IR/SWE b. 1995) is an artist with a master’s degree in Fine Arts from The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (2022). His practice engages with fugitive, ghostly, and diasporic cultures often regarded as apolitical, forgettable, or kitschy. His work explores how these (non)movements manifest in everyday life, creating the potential for improbable futures. Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is represented by institutions such as Moderna Museet, the Public Art Agency Sweden, and the Arab Image Foundation Library. He has previously conducted artistic research at the Arab Image Foundation and was artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. He has exhibited at venues such as the 10th Berlin Biennale, Moderna Museet, Sophiensaele, Public Art Agency Sweden, and West Den Haag. Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is a member of the collective Noncitizen, and his work has been published in magazines and platforms such as Glänta and Paletten.

Link to website: https://afrangnordlofmalekian.com/

Study Material, Links, and References:

• https://www.diacriticsjournal.com/unarchive-3-the-undocument/
• https://savvy-contemporary.com/en/events/2024/phantoms-of-promise/
• https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/at-the-border/325755/the-magic-of-borders/
• https://www.e-flux.com/events/533907/in-the-presence-of-absence-an-evening-with-noncitizen/
• https://www.loganfebruary.com/
• Darwish, Mahmoud. In the Presence of Absence. Translated by Sinan Antoon. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2011.
• Farrokhzad, Forough. Someone Who Is Not Like No One. Translated by Michael C. Hillmann. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986.
• Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979.
• Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Wong, Ming, Biji Diva!. Performance, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2011.
• Werbner, Pnina, and Mattia Fumanti, eds. The Aesthetics of Diaspora: Ownership and Appropriation. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013.

Read more about the research project: FutureBrownSpace

Read more about the Seminar serie: A Season of Black study II