Since 2012 the ground-breaking transdisciplinary event known as BE.BOP. Black Europe Body Politics has taken place in the post-migrant experimental theatre space, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin, in cooperation with Art Labour Archives. 2012 and 2013 were the first international events centered on Black European citizenship in connection to contemporary moving image and performative practices. These meetings have engaged European audiences in intricate detail with the outrage generated by Black/African Diaspora peoples when confronting a racist world order structured along the lines of coloniality. BE.BOP 2014 will bring resistance into the hallowed grounds of healing by means of retracing the spiritual map of Pan-Africanism before and after the so-called “Scramble for Africa.”
BE.BOP is motivated and theoretically embedded to Decolonial Aesthetics/AestheSis and more specifically to Afropean Decoloniality, a term coined by curator, Alanna Lockward who will be presenting a selection of the video-art by Caribbean and Black Diaspora artists Jeannette Ehlers, Teresa María Díaz Nerio and Mwangi Hutter.
Biography
Alanna Lockward has excelled as a journalist, classical ballet dancer, author and contemporary arts curator specialized in time-based undertakings. Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, she has a licentiate degree in Communication Science from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, México City, and a masters in Art in Context from the University of the Arts, Berlin. She obtained a diploma on Dance Education from the Royal Academy of Dancing and performed, among other companies, with the Ballet Clásico Nacional (Santo Domingo), Ballet de Cámara de Jalisco (Guadalajara), Neubert Ballet (New York City) and the Australian Opera (Sydney).
Lockward is the author of Apremio: apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (Cendeac, 2006), a collection of essays, and the short novel Marassá y la Nada (Santuario 2013). She was cultural editor of Listín Diario, research journalist of Rumbo magazine and columnist of the Miami Herald and is currently a columnist of Acento.com.do.
At the Museo de Arte Moderno (Santo Domingo) she was appointed Director of International Affairs (1988) and was designated as Selection Jury of the XX Bienal Nacional de Artes Visuales (1996) and as Award Jury in its 26 edition (2011).
She has been a guest lecturer on critical race theory, decolonial aesthetics and Black feminism at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, the Decolonial Summer School Middelburg, Transart Institute, the University of Warwick and Goldsmiths University of London.
Lockward is based in Berlin where she directs Art Labour Archives, a cultural platform and agency responsible for producing situation-specific art events and exhibitions, since 1996, in the US, the Caribbean, Europe and the African continent. Parallel to this, she is also associate curator of the post-migrant theatre space Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and general manager of the Transnational Decolonial Institute. As a curator she has been awarded by the Allianz Cultural Foundation, the Danish Arts Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers.
