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Ingrid Pollard, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, First International Feminist Book Fair, London, 1984. © 2026 Ingrid Pollard. All rights reserved, SIAE/DACS. Courtesy: the artist
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EDITORIAL
Dear readers,
How to respond to an invocation to think within the rhythms of a “collective score,” as the late Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025) proposed in her curatorial statement for this year’s Venice Biennale?
We have invited to work with us, as a friend and guest editor for our Survey and Columns, the scholar and curator Christine Eyene. To her, tons of gratitude. “Quite naturally,” she writes, “the conversation geared toward the work and place of women in the Black Arts Movement—a presence to which Lubaina Himid gave visibility in three seminal exhibitions in the 1980s that established the premise of a Black feminist curatorial practice in Britain and beyond.” Retracing past histories as a way to collectively remember that it takes time for radical shifts to occur.
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SURVEY: Women Artists in the Black Arts Movement
Revisiting an Origin Story
Looking back to the 1982 First National Black Art Convention and the exhibition Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain (2011–12), artist Lubaina Himid, curator Paul Goodwin, and Christine Eyene reflect on Himid’s impactful practice, whether creating, curating, preserving, writing, or teaching.
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Beyond the Boundary
By revisiting her 1989 groundbreaking essay on Himid, Sutapa Biswas, and Sonia Boyce published in Third Text, Gilane Tawadros affirms the necessity of constructing critical frameworks that disturb established canons, like Postmodernism, which largely ignored the perspectives of Black women artists.
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OPINIONS: On Solidarity Within and Beyond the Arts
In the wake of South African Pavilion’s cancellation, its curator, Ingrid Masondo, discusses with Eyene censorship as a condition embedded within the political economies of the art world, and what it means to participate in it while resisting its exclusions.
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FICTION: Toni Morrison
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Toni Morrison’s lecture for the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, here reprinted, testifies to her powerful fabulation, at the core of Kouoh’s In Minor Keys.
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CURATORS: Developmental Curation
Reflecting on the key exhibition Like a Virgin (2009) at CCA Lagos, Serubiri Moses retraces the curatorial practice of Bisi Silva (1962–2019) as a form of reparation grounded in a critical understanding of gender and identities.
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THINKERS: Chronopolitical Interventions
Gee Wesley on theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun, whose work “asks that we reexamine past projects not only to render evidence of the interiority of our forebears or restore dignity to their lives, but also to animate their unfinished business.”
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MONOGRAPH: For the Earth, It’s Not a Secret
“Signification is a loop. I am listening to the Earth’s vibrations that travel both across the surface and through the crust, but also through the core, so they complicate the idea of the local,” says Nolan Oswald Dennis in conversation with Zoë Hopkins.
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MONOGRAPH: Like Saturn, Know Thyself
Ahead of Comme Saturne, Yto Barrada’s French Pavilion, Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu turns the planet into a metaphor for patriarchal power to explore Barrada’s engagement with colonial histories, language, and resistance.
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Visual: When Things Fall Apart for Whom?
Gala Porras-Kim opens up to Lauren Cornell about her presentation at the Applied Arts Pavilion (a joint project by the Biennale and the V&A Museum), circling back to classification, law, and the power dynamics of art history.
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Books: Susan Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (MIT Press, 2020); Helen Garner, This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (Text Publishing, 2014); Shola von Reinhold, LOTE (Jacaranda Books, 2020). By Izabella Scott.
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Mousse & Textwork: Conversation Series #2
A new chapter in our collaboration with TextWork, the editorial platform of Fondation Pernod Ricard. Read here the conversation between Ali Cherri and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie.
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