BLACK PORTRAITURE[S]: Absent/ed Presence, 2021 [Online Event]

Image: Installation view, Sandra Brewster: Blur, July 24, 2019 – March 29, 2020 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Work shown: Untitled (Blur), 2017 – 2019 © Sandra Brewster Photo: AGO

BLACK PORTRAITURE[S]: Absent/ed Presence, 2021, is the first of the Black Portraiture[s] conference series to take place in Canada. This year, we explore Blackness as absent/ed presence in art, art history, performance, archives, museums, cultural production, and technology. Black Portraiture[s]: Absent/ed Presence, 2021, invites artists, researchers, and scholars to explore Blackness as absent/ed presence in art, art history, performance, archives, museums, cultural production, and technology. Presenters consider Blackness as unfixed, ungeographic, invisible and hypervisible, opaque, local and global, while asking: What is the role of abstraction in representation? What are the opportunities and limits in logics of representation? How can we, as thinkers and artists, realize new ways of seeing and what can be found therein? What is the current state of Black creative labour? What are methods for attending to that which the archive absents? What can be learned from all that evades archival capture? How might we imagine Blackness into and out of art’s past, present, and future? 



Due to travel restrictions and the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s conference will take place virtually via Zoom, in partnership with and hosted by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University. 



The Keynote Lecture features M. NourbeSe Philip and is hosted by the Art Gallery of Ontario on
 Wednesday, October 13 at 1 pm EST. Following the keynote, M. NourbeSe Philip will be in conversation with DJ and curator Mark V. Campbell. To register for the Keynote Lecture, please visit this page.



The conference will also include online Studio Visits by artists across the world shared via Instagram (@blackportraitures) - as well as Breakout Sessions curated by Nasrin Himada, Agnes's Associate Curator of Academic Outreach and Community Engagement.


If you have questions, please email us at info.blackportraituresto@gmail.com

With Support from The Ford Foundation, Toronto Arts Council, The Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) & Center for Black Visual Culture (CBVC) at New York University, The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, The Art Gallery of Ontario.