Public Lecture by Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Title: The Land Sings Back: Botanical Visions, Fugitive Assemblages and an Art for the Afterlife
While we live in the afterlives of colonial systems of extraction, the artworks included in this exhibition assemble alternative visions of reciprocity. These affiliations are drawn in the fugitive journeys of people and plants, they are formed in new repositories of care, grown from structures of protection, plotted from lines of displacement and shaped by alternative histories of creation and regeneration. This talk explores the intellectual genealogies this exhibition calls up, tracing how the artists gathered here guide us towards the histories we need now, to nurture the entanglements that will sustain our future.
THE SPEAKER
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic Art at Princeton University. She is jointly appointed in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Her research and teaching focus on Black Diaspora Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and medicine in the long 19th century. She also has interests in British, South Asian and Australian art. Her first book Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World, is available from Duke University Press.
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Lead Image (left): Shiraz Bayjoo, Botanical Shrines, 2024. Acrylic and resin on wood, botanical specimens, Mahogany wood, Giant African snail shells, glass, gold chain, metal coins, faux pearls, sea shells, ‘Coral island’ book, doily, volcanic rocks. Dimensions variable. Courtesy 421 Arts Campus, Dubai and the artist. Photo: Ismail Noor
Lead image (right): Charmaine Watkiss, The warrior exercises the right to dissent, 2025. Coffee, water soluble graphite, pencil, coloured pencil, watercolour and shell gold on paper. 76 x 56 cm (framed 88 x 66cm). Courtesy the artist
