Traces of Ecstasy Symposium

The ICA invites you to join us for a day of lectures and conversations about our current Spring exhibition, Traces of Ecstasy. The symposium will gather artists, writers, and scholars who have contributed to the theoretical work behind Traces of Ecstasy in both the Lagos Biennial and the current iteration now on view at ICA VCU. A day of presentations and discussions will explore the themes and works of Traces of Ecstasy along with a curator-led tour and a performance from choreographer and artist, Raymond Pinto. The public is encouraged to stay for the whole day or drop in for select presentations and performances. For the full day’s schedule and list presenter see below and to learn more about Raymond Pinto’s performance click here

Presentations and discussions explore the fraught relationship between colonial modernity and African indigeneity; the pitfalls of postcolonial statecraft; the intersections of critical African studies and queer and feminist theory; and the affinities between African metaphysical schemes and digital technologies.

11:00 AM Intro

11:15 AM Kevin Okoth, “What lies beyond the ‘Poisoned Gift’?: Notes on African liberation and the neo-colonial state”

11:40 AM Kwame Edwin Otu, “Adieu, Queer?: Skepticism as Politics in the age of African LGBT+ Human Rights.”

12:05-12:30 PM Q & A with Chioke I’Anson

12:30-2:00 PM Lunch Break / Free viewing of exhibition

2:00 PM Nkhensani Mkhari, “iZinkisi: A Techno-Spiritual Symphony”

2:25 PM Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “A Casual Mathematics”

2:50-3:15 PM Q & A with KJ Abudu

3:15pm-3:40 PM Nkiru Nzegwu, “African Aesthetics: Disrobing Modernism, Becoming Visible in History”

3:40 PM Concluding remarks by KJ Abudu

3:50pm-4:15 PM Tour of Traces of Ecstasy with KJ Abudu

4:15-5:00 PM Happy hour at the ICA cafe

5:00 PM The symposium will conclude with mirror worlds, a performance by artist and choreographer Raymond Pinto, in the ICA Forum.

Nkhensani Mkhari

Nkhensani Mkhari (b. 1994) is a South African post-disciplinary curator and artist who engages in a variety of practices under the guiding principle that “the medium chooses the message.” Their work, a queer meditation on transience, aesthetic sociology, and the relationship between Ntu spiritual practices and technology, navigates the nuances of individuality, collectivity, and shared spaces.

Lecture: “iZinkisi: A Techno-Spiritual Symphony”

Kwame Edwin Otu

Kwame Edwin Otu (b. 1983) is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Otu is a cultural anthropologist with interests ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, to their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. Otu’s first monograph, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana, is part of the New Sexual Worlds Series edited by Marlon Bailey and Jeffrey McCune and is published by the University of California Press. Otu’s current/ongoing project investigates the global politics of e-waste in particular, and the undulations of global environmental transitions, in general, and their impacts on African and African-descended bodies. Entitled The Salvage Slot: Technology and the Ecologies of the After-Afterlife, it is an ethnography on waste workers on an e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, that investigates Africa’s paradoxical location as a site of extraction and deposition.

Lecture: “Adieu, Queer?: Skepticism as Politics in the age of African LGBT+ Human Rights.”

Kevin Ochieng Okoth

Kevin Ochieng Okoth (b. 1992) is a writer based in London. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and a member of the Salvage Editorial Collective. His first book, Red Africa (2023), is out now.

Lecture: “What lies beyond the ‘Poisoned Gift’?: Notes on African liberation and the neo-colonial state”

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

A learner,Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985) explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed is interested in Black knowledge production and fugitivity.

Lecture: “A Casual Mathematics”

Nkiru Nzegwu

Nkiru Nzegwu (b. 1954) is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies at Binghamton University, New York, and 2023-2024 Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is the founder of Africa Knowledge Project and has published extensively on African aesthetics, art, feminism, and philosophy.

Lecture: “African Aesthetics: Disrobing Modernism, Becoming Visible in History”