A Black Gaze with Tina CamptA Black Gaze with Tina Campt

As part of Het Nieuwe Instituut's research on burn-out and exhausted bodies, this series investigates how voices, oral histories, and collective, embodied listening could be deployed as a counterbalance of the pervasiveness of the image and the growing pressure to put bodies on display.

For this event, Tina Campt, who is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, reads from her forthcoming book_ A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See_ (2021).

Listeners are encouraged to use headphones or an external sound system while listening to this Remote Reading Room.

Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and a research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) of the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of three books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich_ (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe_ (2012), and _Listening to Images_ (2017). Her fourth book, _A Black Gaze_, will be published by MIT Press this autumn.

Zara Julius is a social practice artist, cultural researcher, and vinyl selector (DJ) based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also the founder of Pan-African creative research and cultural production agency, KONJO. Her work is concerned with the relationship between aesthetics, frequency and fugitivity. Through sound, video, performance and object-based installation, her practice involves the collection, selection and creation of archives (both real or imagined). Most of her projects have focused on mapping the sonic and spiritual mobilities of spiritual rapture and rupture with congregants of syncretic religious practices in Africa and Latin America, and on (post-)apartheid narratives around race and place as they pertain to intimate archiving practices. As a selector, she is especially interested in the evolution of spiritual music forms and how they find themselves in contemporary "global bass" music. Julius selects vinyl regularly on the festival circuit in Southern Africa, has toured London (being hosted by Touching Bass, Balamii radio, Hoxton FM, and Total Refreshment Centre) and has also gigged in Cuba and Colombia. She has played alongside artists such as Nubya Garcia, Madala Kunene, Shabaka Hutchings, BLK JKS, Andrew Ashong & DJ Spinna.

The Remote Reading Room is a series of evenings dedicated to the act of reading and collective listening. It is a place to decipher and interpret the world with its countless languages and systems, including phenomena that by their ubiquity evade investigation. Led by an artist, researcher or designer, the audience is invited to engage in a reading of a particular concept, text, object or image. A sound artist or musician is invited to guide the listeners on this sonic journey with an accompanying soundtrack.