Online public lecture as part of the lecture series Conceiving the Ethico-Political Power of Africa’s Contemporary Art(ivism)

This public online lecture will take place from 14:00 to 15:30 on Teams (link to be communicated.)

This lecture will engage with non-Western genealogies of socially engaged art in order to think how art can be a tool for effective, practice-based decolonisation. Gathering a diverse array of creative and activist strategies, socially engaged art remains a crucial platform for progressivist social transformation and direct action. Professor Garrido will argue that anti-colonial processes and genealogies were already advancing and mobilising some of the main concerns that have become commonplace within the global contemporary art world. Claiming these processes and genealogies is important, because many of the pitfalls and criticism associated with socially engaged art derives from long-lasting exclusionary and Eurocentric dynamics.

Carlos Garrido Castellano is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at University College Cork, where he coordinates a BA programme in Portuguese Studies. He is also a Senior Associate Researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD). He is the author of Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future (SUNY Press, 2021), Literary Fictions of the Contemporary Art System (Routledge, 2023) and Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times, as well as of two other monographs in Spanish and one in Portuguese. His work has been translated into several languages. In Cork, he has developed an active programme of socially committed, community-based cultural and research activities. His focus on cultural activism and the legacy of colonialism implies placing diversity and non-extractive research practices and methodologies at the centre of current debates on cultural production as a tool for social transformation.