BCA announces Languid Hands as the first of two new curators in residence
As part of our commitment to amplifying Black voices within the arts and heritage sector, we’ve invited early career curators to engage with the archives as part of two residencies funded by the Arts Council.
This multi-generational collaboration will present the archives in new and thought-provoking ways, to be displayed in our forthcoming online exhibition space. Both projects will be guided by artist and curator Barby Asante.
In the first of two projects, curatorial and artistic duo Languid Hands (Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson) have selected seven UK-based artists to undertake a four-week digital research residency with BCA; Ufuoma Essi, Rhea Dillon, Anisa Nuh-Ali B, Zinzi Minott, Shamica Ruddock, Samra Mayanja and Felix Taylor.
These artists will delve into the archive and produce reflections on their research, activating and re-animating the archive through their relative practices.
“We are deeply grateful for the opportunity to work with the Black Cultural Archives.” say the Languid Hands founders.
“It is essential that in the midst of upsurge in radical resistance to anti-black violence and carceral systems in the UK, we have access to our complex and wayward histories and are able to activate them in the service of our contemporary struggle, always inextricably tethered to times past. As abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2019) writes, “what the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go.”
They concluded “Now is the time to engage in radical sociality and deep study: across geographies, generations and revolutionary horizons. Black liberation is the goal, and art has always been one of many means.”
Visitors will be able to view the outcome of this work on BCA's forthcoming online gallery from November 20, 2020
You can find out more about Languid Hands at their official website, https://languidhands.co.uk/