Choreographing Nothing: On Black Anteriority
Conversation with Rizvana Bradley and Deborah-Joyce Holman
Online Event
Sat, 26 Oct 2024, 7 pm
In the new film Close-Up by Deborah-Joyce Holman there is a scene in which the camera moves slowly through the room and scans the furnishings. The camera passes over a shelf containing a small selection of books, including a copy of Anteaesthetics by Rizvana Bradley.
Starting with a brief lecture on ideas elaborated in her book Anteaesthetics Rizvana Bradley will speak with Deborah-Joyce Holman about the exhibition Close-Up.
The online event will be hosted on Zoom:
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), moves across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—in order to inaugurate a new method for interpretation, an ante-formalism, which demonstrates black art’s recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity.
Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of October. In addition to her academic publications such her art criticism has also been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Galleries, London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam.
Bradley’s work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was the 2023–24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.
The online event will be held in English.
The exhibition is supported by:
Image: Rizvana Bradley; Deborah-Joyce Holman, Photo: Jelena Luise