Precarious Decades Ima-Abasi Okon and Hansi Momodu-Gordon

Image: Ima-Abasi Okon, #########################, 2014. Video still. Image courtesy the artist.

This conversation between Ima-Abasi Okon and Hansi Momodu-Gordon is the second in a series of three dialogues between artists and curators to take place between January and April 2017. The ‘Precarious Decades’ series will examine strategies of hope and subversion through collaboration and allegiance. These were marked out as decisive ways of working for artists and curators, committed to interrogating questions around race and gender in the post-war period of the 20th century. Given the precarious political moment we find ourselves in now, do artists working today see themselves presenting a different spectrum of historical, theoretical and political influences and encounters? What are the new terms of reference for curatorial and artistic practice framed by the experience of the diaspora?

Biographies

Ima-Abasi Okon is a London based artist, working across print, sculpture and moving image. Influenced by an intimate biography of material and form, her work often culminates in enigmatic and layered arrangements exposing infrastructures and systems within the culture. Recent exhibitions include: ‘UNTITLED: Art on the Conditions of Our Time’, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK (2017); ‘In This Soup We Swim’, Kingsgate Project Space, London, UK (2016); ‘Changing City: Shifting Places’, CCA Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria (2016); ‘Arena’, Center of Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland (2014) and a number of screenings including Akademie der Künst, Cologne, Germany (2016); Mount Florida Studios, Glasgow, UK (2016); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany (2015); Atomic Pictures, Paris, France (2015).

Hansi Momodu-Gordon is an independent curator and writer. She is founder of Future Assembly, a platform for artist experimentation and development and her recent projects and collaborations include co-curating ‘UNTITLED: Art on the Conditions of Our Time’, New Art Exchange (2017- touring); curating ‘Concerning Symmetry’, selected artists’ moving image from the Emile Stipp Collection (2016); producing ‘Promised Land’, Culture+Conflict (2016), and publishing her first book 9 Weeks with Stevenson (2016). Hansi has developed projects with The Showroom (2015) and Autograph ABP (2015) and as Assistant Curator at Tate Modern (2011 to 2015) she worked on contemporary exhibitions, commissions, live events and acquisitions research. Hansi previously held curatorial positions at Turner Contemporary and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. Her writing on contemporary art has been published by the Fowler Museum, UCLA (forthcoming), Tate, The Walther Collection, Rencontres de Bamako 10th edition, Contemporary And (C&), Frieze and other leading arts publishers.

Recording