Ruptures Beyond the Frame

Lecture & Film “Black Atlantic Cinema”

Lecture: Awa Konaté (Abu Dhabi / London)

This presentation explores the significance of curating Black Atlantic cinema as an essential curatorial praxis of memory work, focusing on its capacity to confront double consciousness and offer alternatives for Black survival. Engaging with W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of seeing oneself “through the eyes of a nation that looked back in contempt,” the presentation propounds the ways in which curators vis-a-vis filmmakers in the Black Atlantic draw upon the political work of film to rethink today’s globalized world. Moving beyond the restrictive frameworks of the nation-state and national cinemas, the concept of Black Atlantic Cinema provides a transnational lens through which African and diasporic filmmakers articulate histories of displacement, resistance, and world-making across three continents and several centuries. Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1970) dramatizes the alienation of African migrants in France, capturing the psychic dissonance of double consciousness within a neocolonial European landscape. Similarly, Martina Attille’s Dreaming Rivers (1988) poetically meditates on migration and diasporic memory, constructing a cinematic language that resists the linearity of national belonging. By curating these films within a Black Atlantic Cinema framework, this presentation argues for a transnational curatorial approach that foregrounds cinema as both a continental and diasporic medium-that not only reveals the fractures of double consciousness, but also generates new modalities of Black being and survival beyond the borders of the nation-state.

Awa Konaté is a curator, art consultant, and founder of the curatorial platform Culture Art Society (CAS). Her curatorial practice draws on archival research, Black feminist pedagogies, and memory work, with a particular interest in interdisciplinarity and lens-based practices of African descendant artists, and their resonance within global contemporary art.