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Fellowship

Fellow 2017/2018

Sepake Angiama during Propositions #6: The Temporary Institute for the Contemporary on 30 June 2018, photo: Tom Janssen

Sepake Angiama

Sepake Angiama is a curator and educator interested in discursive practices, the social framework, and how we shape and form our experiences in understanding the world. She is inspired by working with artists who disrupt or provoke the social sphere through action, design, dance, and architecture. She is the initiator of Under the Mango Tree: Sites of Learning in cooperation with ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), Stuttgart. Through notions of unlearning and indigenous knowledge, artist-led project spaces, libraries, and schools interested in unfolding discourses gather to discuss and build radical education practices that destabilize the European canon. Previously, Angiama was Head of Education for documenta 14, Kassel, 2017; Director of Education for Manifesta 10, Saint Petersburg, 2014; and Curator of Public Programmes at Turner Contemporary, Margate. She has created education programs for several institutions, including Tate Modern, London, and Hayward Gallery, London. Angiama lives and works in transition.

Sepake Angiama

Sepake Angiama is a curator and educator interested in discursive practices, the social framework, and how we shape and form our experiences in understanding the world. She is inspired by working with artists who disrupt or provoke the social sphere through action, design, dance, and architecture. She is the initiator of Under the Mango Tree: Sites of Learning in cooperation with ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), Stuttgart. Through notions of unlearning and indigenous knowledge, artist-led project spaces, libraries, and schools interested in unfolding discourses gather to discuss and build radical education practices that destabilize the European canon. Previously, Angiama was Head of Education for documenta 14, Kassel, 2017; Director of Education for Manifesta 10, Saint Petersburg, 2014; and Curator of Public Programmes at Turner Contemporary, Margate. She has created education programs for several institutions, including Tate Modern, London, and Hayward Gallery, London. Angiama lives and works in transition.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

“Her Imaginary”

How does she inhabit the structures of the past with visions of the future?

She was always fascinated with how her living environment shaped her understanding of the world, how the relationship to others conditioned her behavior, how advertising affected perceptions of class, sex, and gender, how food culture introduced new social rituals of eating together, and how TV could project visions of the future. In the last days, she had been trying to find a film that had once been recommended to her by a friend. The image of a black woman airing her voice over the radio, the protagonist of the story, was captured on a film poster. Timid to embark on a mode of self-reflection, she wanted to raise questions that could awaken her own political struggle, and that was one of positioning in order to address questions of race, class, gender, the role of education in perpetuating stereotypes. Instead of scrutinizing reality, she wondered how science fiction could help her create collective visions not yet seen, memories of events not yet happened, a new language not yet spoken. She had only recently found her voice. It was soft, calm, thoughtful, and reflective. It also rarely questioned the simplest of things that had been accepted as “that’s just how it is.” But now was the moment that she wanted to question everything.

Sepake Angiama conducts readings of novels, film screenings, and listening sessions to explore how science fiction may be the perfect tool for capturing the imagination needed to address non-fascist living.

Sepake Angiama Curator of 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial

BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Sepake Angiama co-curates the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial …And Other Such Stories.  As part of the program, Fellow 2017/2018 BAK Fellows Ola Hassanain’s work was part of the exhibition. From the curators’ statement: “Titled …and other such stories, the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial is rooted in close readings of the spatial realities of its […]

All Good Things Must Begin: A Conversation Between Audre Lorde and Octavia E. Butler

“All Good Things Must Begin: A conversation between Audre Lorde and Octavia E. Butler” took place at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, as a space for reading, writing, screening, reflection, and conversation on intersectional feminism, modernist architecture, and science fiction, and forms part of Sepake Angiama’s BAK Fellowship research Her Imaginary. https://www.sbcgallery.ca/sepake-angiama

Program