afro-fractions
Roberta Joy Rich and Samira Farah
Published August 2024
Okwui Enwezor is one of the most distinguished African curators of his time, if not, one of the most important curators of the 20th and 21st century, that has also been most successful in penetrating and undermining the reductive nature of the white canon construct of contemporary art, offering new modes of thinking towards plurality while challenging conformist ideas of international biennales.
For their offering, Roberta and Samira have created a visual constellation of their time in the United Arab Emirates sharing their personal photographs, videos, posters, street images and linking it to the work and writings of Black African theorists, critics, musicians and artists across the diaspora within their interpretation of Okwui ideas.
Being peer African arts workers, artists, educators, curators and producers, Roberta and Samira begin to contemplate their manifestations of being Black across geographies and within their Counterflow, their proximity to Okwui and the frequencies they start to constellate.
Biographies
Born on Wathaurong Country (Geelong, Australia 1988), Roberta Joy Rich is a multi-disciplinary artist also working as an educator and curator in Narrm (Melbourne). Often drawing upon her lived experiences as a diaspora Southern African ‘Cape’ woman with Afro-Asian lineages, Roberta utilises language, text, video, archives, photo-media, satire and storytelling as platforms to interrogate constructs of race, gender, imperialism, Western singularity and notions of authenticity. With a focus on communal knowledge systems, alterity, socio-political histories, environment and popular culture, much of her installation and mixed media projects explore resilience, power, memory, belonging and truth-telling. She is interested in critical fabulation and anarchiving as processes for unearthing silenced and emergent narratives, and the possibilities they conjure. Roberta’s work aims to deconstruct colonial modalities whilst proposing empowering sites of collective self-determination.
Samira Farah is a creative producer, broadcaster and researcher raised on Darug lands. Her focus is on the history and relationship between the Black African diaspora in Australia and globally with a specific interest in visual and media arts. She hosts a weekly show on Melbourne radio station Triple R that focuses on the intersection of arts, politics, pop culture and media through a lens of gender and race.