Art in the Spotlight: Visualizing Freedom Dreams

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Thursday July 8, 12 pm via Zoom (register, here)

Bushra Junaid, Two Pretty Girls… 2016. Archival photograph and archival text printed on backlit fabric panel, 176.8 cm x 89.5 cm. ©Bushra Junaid.

Join celebrated historian Robin D.G. Kelley (USA), whose book Freedom Dreams explores the Black radical imagination, in conversation with renowned artists John Akomfrah (UK/Ghana) creator of Vertigo Sea—a stunning meditation on the whaling industry, the slave trade and the current migrant crisis—and Bushra Junaid (Canada), whose Two Pretty Girls… brings to life the entanglements between Newfoundland and the legacies of plantation.

Together they explore what it means to visualize freedom dreams, placing their own contemporary work in dialogue with historical images contained in the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs recently acquired by the AGO.

Moderated by Julie Crooks, AGO Curator, Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora and curator of upcoming exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory.