Screenings followed by a conversation with Brahim Tall and Stanley Ollivier, moderated by Sorana Munsya (in English)

Tukuleur

Brahim Tall
16 minutes
no dialogues

Hair, posture and skin colour shift, intersect and alternate, creating a choreography of looks and poses based on representations throughout art history and pop culture. By making its central character ever changing, Tukuleur attempts to show how our gaze influences the interpretation of different bodies in different contexts. The film then shows the consequences of these gazes and their linked representations for the personal growth of the character, and their struggle to find a place between acceptance and otherness.

The School of Mutants

Hamedine Kane & Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, 2020
12 minutes
In French with English subtitles

The School of Mutants stages a radio interview in a fictional and uncertain time. Two characters talk about how to inhabit the territory. Their discussion seems to resonate with the landscape of brutalist and industrial ruins that surrounds them. A tension arises, between doubts and questions about their vision of the future. In contrast to the fatalism of one, the other argues that the ruins are a shelter for organizing a common life and breaking the cycle of political disillusionment. Oscillating between cinema of the real and futuristic speculation, the work leads us into a poetic and political reflection on the mutations of the world. The work is part of a long-term research that artists Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro have been conducting since 2018 around projects for alternative schools and universities conceived after Senegal's independence. Mixing post-colonial utopia, pan-Africanism and radical architecture, these schools, most of which have been forgotten, emanated from successive governments, drawing a palimpsest history in which knowledge and power are intertwined in the search for decolonised futures. From the University of the African Future in Diamniadio, an abandoned cooperation project with Taiwan on the outskirts of Dakar, the thread of the investigation goes back to the ruins of the colonial school William Ponty, a breeding ground for African independence fighters whose legendary history spans the whole of the twentieth century, but also the former University of the Mutants on the island of Gorée and the Mudra project which became Ecole des Sables. In the middle of the fields of Diamniadio, the construction of a new corporate district and business schools sketches out a neoliberal narrative of the future, following the "Emerging Senegal" investment programme.

Brahim Tall builds his artistic practice around different forms of research, expression and identity politics. Based on personal experiences, he addresses social themes such as representation, miscegenation and racial displacement. Depending on the project and the context, this research will take the form of photographs, films, installations, (collective) performances or DJ sets. With Tukuleur, Brahim obtained his master's degree in photography (with great distinction) at LUCA Brussels, while winning the VAF Wildcard in 2022.
https://www.instagram.com/_brahimtall_/

Hamedine Kane is a Senegalese and Mauritanian artist and director. His film The Blue House, which had its world premiere at IDFA in Amsterdam in November 2020, received a special mention from the jury.
https://www.instagram.com/hamedine.kane7/

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro is an artist, ecologist, and curator. He has had exhibitions and collaborations with international institutions such as ZKM Museum (Karlsruhe), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Institut Kunst (Basel), Technê Institute (Buffalo), Science Museum (London), documenta 13 (Kassel).
https://www.instagram.com/stephane.verlet.bottero/

Stanley Ollivier is a dancer, performer and maker from Paris, France. He studied dance and musical at the International Dance Academy in Paris, Contemporary Dance at the CNSMDP in Paris and at P.A.R.T.S. where he obtained his Master of Arts in Dance. He works around the questions about the place of amusement in contemporary dance, context shift, care, identity, humor and versatility. He is an active member of the Ballroom scene and part of the Iconic House Of Ninja in Paris/Brussels. He recently started DJ-ing under the name of Shyb BOO.
https://stanleyollivier.cargo.site

Sorana Munsya is an independent curator and psychologist living in Brussels. She is interested in notions of fugitivity, opacity, healing and how they relate to blackness. Focusing on contemporary visual arts created by African and black artists, her recent projects include the solo exhibition of Belgian-Congolese researcher Leonard Pongo at Bozar (2021), the last solo exhibition of Congolese artist Michèle Magema at Extra City (2021) and the group exhibition "The Act of Breathing" (2022) in collaboration with Kanal-Centre Pompidou, and the solo exhibition of Joud Toamah at Photoforum Pasquart (Biel, Switzerland, 2022). She is a member of the editorial team of the Belgian art magazine H ART and was assistant curator of the 5th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Lubumbashi and has contributed to numerous art catalogs such as the catalog of the 12th Rencontres de Bamako, the catalog of the last Belgian solo exhibition of Pascale Marthine Tayou, the catalog of the exhibition "Congoville" and others. She is appointed artistic advisor for a project of work in the public space in Brussels with the NGO SOS Children's Villages.