Reports

Towards A Black Testimony, Part 2: Terrain

Towards A Black Testimony, Part 2: Terrain, an exhibition project that examines the notion of Black Testimony through facilitating caring networks and artistic dialogue across Black diaspora. Exploring multiple ways of relating to Black artists’ personal experiences, it critically addresses the issues of visibility, representation and participation of Black people at Czech art institutions.

Towards a Black Testimony is an ongoing project by the London-based artistic and curatorial duo Languid Hands. Using the film Towards A Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace as both artwork and curatorial note, the project brings together artists, thinkers, writers, listeners and speakers to respond to the ideas in the film and to explore the complexity of Black testimony through their own experience. The four part iteration at Display, Prague engages the practice of Black artists in the Czech Republic as a response to the film.

An important part of the project was Part 1 Orientation – an online screening of Rabz Lansiquot’s filmwhere did we land (2019)and the residency of two Afroczech artists, Natalie Perkof and Yvonne Vácha at MeetFactory. For Part 2, this exhibition includes their work from the residency, which can be viewed as a response to the themes of Towards A Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace, their meeting as artists, and to ongoing dialogue with Languid Hands. In a new moving image made by Natalie Perkof and Yvonne Vácha, the Senegalese dance becomes a tool for enacting a collective shared memory.

Hana Janečková

artistsLanguid Hands, MELANINKIDS, Perkof Natalie, Yvonne Vácha
curatorsLanguid Hands, Hana Janečková, Zuzana Jakalová
placeGalerie Display
tags
castNatalie Perkof, Hana Janečková
cameraJiří Žák
soundJiří Žák
editingJiří Žák
interviewJiří Žák
categoryReports
published19. 4. 2021
languageČesky / English
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Towards A Black Testimony, Part 2: Terrain
The curators displayed in glass show-cases toys belonging to forty artists, art theoreticians and architects who grew up in the 1970s and 80s. When we look back we realize that the exhibition was partly a serious and partly an ironic commentary of this kinship and an advance signal of the advent of the period of normalization which became a basic source for the work of a number of Czech artists after the year 2000.