Talks

Art in the Spotlight: Visualizing Freedom Dreams

black and white archival photo of two girls standing closely together against a background of a corn field. Printed over their white dresses is historic newspaper text. The image is bordered by white with the name of the photography studio printed in cursive.

Bushra Junaid, Two Pretty Girls... 2016. Archival photograph and archival text printed on backlit fabric panel, 176.8 cm x 89.5 cm. ©Bushra Junaid.

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Talks

Art in the Spotlight: Visualizing Freedom Dreams

Thursday, July 8, 12 pm
Zoom
Art in the Spotlight: Visualizing Freedom Dreams

Join celebrated historian Robin D.G. Kelley (USA), whose book Freedom Dreams explores the Black radical imagination, in conversation with renowned artists John Akomfrah (UK/Ghana) creator of Vertigo Sea—a stunning meditation on the whaling industry, the slave trade and the current migrant crisis—and Bushra Junaid (Canada), whose Two Pretty Girls... brings to life the entanglements between Newfoundland and the legacies of plantation.

Together they explore what it means to visualize freedom dreams, placing their own contemporary work in dialogue with historical images contained in the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs recently acquired by the AGO.

Moderated by Julie Crooks, AGO Curator, Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora and curator of upcoming exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory.

Visualizing Freedom Dreams is produced by the AGO and York University's annual summer school in International Political Economy and Ecology.​

For requests for Verbal Description, American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and/or live captioning for online and onsite programming, please provide three weeks notice in advance of the event date. The AGO will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than three weeks notice. Please note that automated captioning is available for all online programs. For onsite visits, the AGO offers these supports for an accessible visit. Please contact us to make a request for these or other accessibility accommodations. Learn more about accessibility at the AGO.

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