2:00 pm | Opening by Claire Barbillon (Director of the École du Louvre)
2:10 pm | Introduction by Camille Morineau (Director and co-founder of AWARE)
2:25 pm | Introduction by N’Goné Fall (General Commissioner of the Africa2020 Season)

2:40 pm | Introduction of the Session

2:45 pm | Sule Ameh James (Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa) – A Critical Analysis of Artworks by Two Female Modern Nigerian Artists: Afi Ekong and Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu
This intervention proposes an analysis of three selected works by two Nigerian women artists, Afi Ekong and Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu, whose significant contribution to the development of modern Nigerian art still goes unnoticed in official accounts.

3:20 pm | Nancy Dantas (MoMA, USA) – Bertina Lopes: A Modernist (and Panafricanist) in Arms
This study seeks to provide a reappraisal of Mozambican modernist Bertina Lopes (Maputo 1924 – Rome 2012). It engages with several portraits of the artist in her studio and uses these distinct images to tease out her anti-colonial, pan-African, feminist politics and the studio space as a stage which she used to sow and perform her modernist identity.

3:55 pm | Julia Rensing (Universität Basel, Switzerland) – Contesting the Archive: Namibian Artists’ Renegotiations of the Colonial Past
Focusing on a selection of artworks by Namibian artists Tuli Mekondjo and Vitjitua Ndjiharine, this intervention explores the women’s distinct artistic practices of engaging with the colonial photographic archive. It will show how both artists use divergent strategies to reconfigure the archive, centering the experiences and the lost or obscured narratives of women in their work as a way to reimagine and renegotiate the past and its significance for the present.

4:30 pm | Questions and answers

2:00 pm | Introduction of the session

2:05 pm | Gladys Kalichini (Rhodes University, South Africa) – Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Socio-Political Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia and Zimbabwe
Starting from an in-depth engagement with the photographic archive of independence, this intervention focuses on analysing the underrepresentation of women in national liberation narratives. The suppression of historical narrative and women’s narrative is analysed through the study of women freedom fighters in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

2:40 pm |Martha Kazungu (MARKK Museum, Germany) – Njabala: towards activating the pluralities of Ugandan Womanhood as a site of resistance
This intervention focuses on records of and about female artists in Uganda through studio visits, interviews, articles and exhibitions.

3:15 pm |Ruth Belinga (Université de Dschang, Cameroon) – Aesthetic and socio-anthropological analysis of the art of seven Cameroonian women from three generations
This study is based on the example of seven Cameroonian women artists from three different generations who take a stand against the marginalisation of women’s art: Were Were Liking, Marceline Fouda, Justine Gaga, Ginette Daleu, Kristine Tsala, Gabriella Badjeck, and Aurélie Djiena.

3:50 pm | Questions and answers

2:00 pm | Introduction of the session

2:05 pm | Maha Tazi (Concordia University, Canada) – Women’s Creative Disobedience and the Continuing (Gender) Revolution in Post-Arab Spring Morocco (2011-2019): Slam Poetry and RAPtivism
This study is about the lyrical and rhetorical aspect of street art through slam poetry and rap. While these genres have already been considered by an abundant academic literature as playing a major role in the revolutionary expressions of Arab youth from the 1990s to the Arab Spring, this literature has rarely considered the role of women artists. By analyzing the productions of Moroccan women rappers and slam poets, Maha Tazi’s research aims to bring a feminist aspect to the literature on the creative insurgency that has characterized the Arab Spring.

2:40 pm | Felicia Nitsche (Universität Bayreuth, Germany) – Re-inscribing Antoinette Lubaki into Congolese Art History
This presentation focuses on the watercolor artist Antoinette Lubaki, whose work has been neglected since its creation in the 1920s and 1930s. Being one of the precursors of Congolese modern art, she was left out from the narrative, while her male counterparts caught the attention of the art world. The aim is to rehabilitate her work and the lost stories surrounding it.

3:15 pm | Portia Malatjie (University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, South Africa) – African Sonic and Spiritual Practices : Strategies for a revolution
The paper considers the relationship between Black women’s spiritual work and activism. It considers how Black women and their spiritual work have either initiated or sustained revolutions, and how these revolutionary encounters are represented in contemporary African art practice. The paper will employ spiritual and sonic registers to read the work of Black women artists Lukhanyiso Skosana, Sethembile Msezane, Buhlebezwe Siwani and Bronwyn Katz.

3:50 pm | Question and answers

2:00 pm | Introduction of the session

2:15 pm | Alice Korkor Ebeheakey representing Alice Korkor Ebeheakey, Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Bernard Akoi-Jackson (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana) – Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes. The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa
This intervention focuses on the artists, critics, and curators who have pushed for the pulverization and cancellation of notions of boundaries that confined artists to an “esoteric ethos”, observing contemporary women artists whose practices problematize Africanity and challenge stereotypical ideologies about Africa, art, and women in art.

2:40 pm | Perrin Lathrop representing Perrin Lathrop & Ndidi Dike (Princeton University, USA) – Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism
This study interrogates the archives and history of the Harmon Foundation, a major patron of modern African art in America, through The Politics of Selection, a new archival collage installation by Ndidi Dike that investigates the material presence and absence of women in the story of African modernism and modernity.

3:15 pm |

3:50 pm | Questions and answers