Aperture Live: Platform Africa

About

Platform Africa takes an in-depth look at the dynamic spaces that have shaped conversations about photography in Africa for the last twenty-five years—the biennials, experimental art spaces, and educational workshops in which artists and audiences interact with photography

The issue is edited in collaboration with Bisi Silva, founder and artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria; John Fleetwood, former head of Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop and current director of Photo:, a new African initiative; and Aïcha Diallo, associate editor of the web magazine Contemporary And.

About the Speakers

Malala Andrialavidrazana was born in Madagascar in 1971. Originally trained as an architect, she turned to photography in the early 2000s, and has exhibited at such platforms as the Bamako Biennale and Addis Foto Fest. Her series Echoes (from Indian Ocean (2011–13) considers the intimate spaces and diverse communities of the Indian Ocean region in Madagascar, India, South Africa, and Reunion. Figures, Andrialavidrazana’s latest work, featured in Aperture, combines historical maps, currency, and images of African icons from Nefertiti to Mobutu Sese Seko, alluding to the histories of cartography, globalization, and cultural exchange.

Zineb Sedira was born in Paris in 1963 to Algerian parents and has lived and worked in London since 1986. Over the last two decades, she has become an advocate for artists in Algeria, where, in 2011, she started aria, an international artist residency program. Sedira’s work in photography and video concerns the interrogational stories of the North African Diaspora, her family’s experience during the Algerian War of Independence, and African migrants seeking passage to Europe. Her work has been exhibited internationally and will be featured in solo exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Foundation (2018) and Jeu de Paume (2019).

Zoe Whitley is Curator, International Art, at Tate. She oversees the development of the artists’ film programme at Tate Britain, such as Transform: Artists’ Film, Artists Beyond Film (2014). Since 2014 her role also has included work at Tate Modern, where she co-wrote Tate’s revised Africa acquisitions strategy and researches contemporary artists and art practices from the African continent and the African diaspora. Whitley is co-curator, with Mark Godfrey, of the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern in summer 2017.

Brendan Wattenberg is the managing editor of Aperture magazine. Formerly the director of exhibitions at The Walther Collection in New York, he has contributed essays and interviews to NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Another Africa, Contemporary And, and Aperture’s PhotoBook Review and is the editor of the photobook François-Xavier Gbré: The Past is a Foreign Country. Wattenberg has served on the jury for the Addis Foto Fest in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2016) and the Changjiang International Photography and Video Art Biennale in Chongqing, China (2017).