Artists Connect: The UCL Urban Room and the 15th Dakar Biennale

Image: Dakar, Senegal and Sonia E. Barrett 'Maplective' exhibition in the Urban Room

Kara Blackmore is an anthropologist who uses curating to interrogate difficult social, environmental, and political issues. She is particularly interested in exploring representation, feminist ethics of care and decolonizing knowledge. These themes are reflected in her work as curator at the UCL Urban Room, SCCI’s innovative exhibition and collaboration space, with recent shows exploring thematic and intersecting questions relating to migration (Undocumented? with Nishat Awan), black feminist social practice (Maplective with Sonia E. Barrett) and creative pedagogy (In Practice).

The 15^th Dakar Biennale brings together over 200 artists from Africa and its diaspora. This year’s is focused on the theme of ‘The Wake’.  It is a theme inspired by the work of scholar Christina Sharpe, holding multiple meanings: awakening, a funeral wake, a trail. Artistic Director Salimata Diop explains

“the rich semantic range ultimately provides cultural and metaphorical bridges between art and society. Dakar is an ideal staging ground to convene such a contemporary and artistic conversation on environment and repair.”

The Associate Curator’s design a special exhibition within the larger Biennale. Entitled We Will Stop When the Earth Roars, this year’s exhibition is co-curated by UCL’s own Dr Kara Blackmore. Staged in a wing of the Old Palace of Justice, it is an eco-feminist commentary on the ecological and social effects of consumerism, development, extractivism and agriculture, combining perspectives of rage with artistic approaches to care and grief tending, paying particular attention to how natural fibers and botanical histories can respond to narratives of catastrophe and violence.

“Each artist is concerned with a different geography yet they are connected by our urgency to address the impacts of waste, ecological violence and dispossession. Creative perspectives range from focusing on issues of urbanism in Dakar and post war social movements in Colombia with resonance to growth in South Africa and Martinique, approaches to care in Brazil, and farming in Benin. Together the works are a collective investigation into the unseen and unspoken realities that permeate ecological and social catastrophe. In particular, there is a focus on labor, women’s labor, and the cosmological connection between different knowledge systems. The result is a polyphonic refusal to be silenced. – Kara Blackmore, Cindy Olohou & Marynet J, curators of We Will Stop When the Earth Roars”

Part of the exhibition is Wolff Architects, a design studio concerned with developing an architectural practice of consequence through the mediums of design, advocacy, research and documentation. Their installation ‘Summer Flowers’ of sound, drawings, plant pressings and texts authored by Bessie Head- uses botanical and sonic registers to understand issues of belonging between apartheid segregated South Africa and Serowe Botswana. After it’s show in Dakar, the installation will come to the UCL Urban Room (January 2025) To locate it in the context of East London and through publishing practices, found in the Pumflett Summer Flowers, Ilze Wolff will share her practice of collaborative architecture and art making.

Also linking between the Urban Room and the Dakar Biennale is the work of multidisciplinary artist Sonia E. Barrett. Sonia’s work explores the boundaries between determinism and free will, focusing on issues of race and gender, often through deconstruction. ‘Maplective’ was shown in the Urban Room from March to June 2024. The exhibition used European tools instrumental in creating colonial power, such as desks, maps, and cameras, and reconfigured them to do the cultural work they disrupted. Sonia also worked with local groups of black and brown women forming the 'East Bank map-lective', to shred and braid the maps of colonised and post colonised, coloniser and post coloniser territories. The result of this work is going to be displayed in the Biennale and expanded through another iteration of Maplective gathering that moves from UK empire histories to French colonialism.

Kara explains the importance of this multidirectional working between Dakar and London:

“curatorial practice is as much about showing artwork as it is about what we learn in the process of making spaces for dialogue. Showing Summer Flowers and Maplective in both London and Dakar allows us to link academic institutions with a wider cultural and creative community. Even though the Urban Room and the Palace of Justice are vastly different in their form, urban contexts, and social histories they both support a level of risk-taking where we artists and curators can continue to push the boundaries of our practice.”

The 15^th Dakar Biennale runs 7 November – 7 December 2024.