Inventive Leaps, Unruly Voyages: A Roundtable on “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art”

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Friday, March 27, 2026. 12:00 noon-3:00 pm Eastern USA
Webinar

https://american.zoom.us/j/96865201403

Meeting ID: 968 6520 1403

Conveners: Mark Auslander (American University)
and Abdi Osman (University at Buffalo, SUNY)

“There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved.”
― Flora Nwapa, Efuru (1966)

“I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in
introducing invention into existence.”
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967)

This International remote roundtable considers the dynamics of creativity and crisis in making sense of LGBTQ+ art produced within Africa or Africa-adjacent contexts. Confronting waves of institutionalized homophobia and transphobia, perpetrated by state and non-state actors and networks, queer artists and activists have pursued aesthetic interventions characterized by edginess, verve, absurdity, humor, joy, camp, and parody, suffused at times with mourning, outrage, and pathos. The remarkable range of work presented in the new exhibition, “Here” Pride and Belonging in African Art,” (curated by Kevin Dumouchelle and Serubiri Moses) at the the National Museum of African Art, illustrates the dynamics of inventiveness in moments of personal and collective crisis. We consider as well the curatorial challenges of mounting such an exhibition at this moment of history, and the coordinated creative energies called forth by the “Here’ production team under unprecedented circumstances.

Our point of departure is the famous dictum in Flora Nwapa’s 1966 novel, Efuru: “There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved.” Our discussion is equally informed by Frantz Fanon’s call, in the face of historical crises of structural oppression, for unruly “leaps” into unscripted territories that “introduce invention” into everyday existence. Where, at the edge of new horizons of the possible introduced by the “Here” artists, might we now go traveling?

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Public Ethnography Lab, American University, Washington DC

For more information, please contact: Mark Auslander, markauslander@icloud.com

Co-conveners

Mark Auslander, PhD, a sociocultural and historical anthropologist, currently teaches at American University in Washington DC.  He has published extensively on art, ritual, race, and the politics of difference. He is author of the award-wining book, “The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family” (University of Georgia Press, 2011) and co-editor with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston of “In Search of Lost Futures: Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality, Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).  Mark has served as a curator and museum director, with emphases on natural  science, cultural history, expressive arts, and community engagement.  He is the author of the chapter, “Transgressive Energies: Crossing Gendered Frontiers in African Art, Ritual, and Moral Imagination” in the volume “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art” (Smithsonian Books, 2026, forthcoming, edited by Kevin D. Dumouchelle.

Abdi Osman is a Somali Canadian multidisciplinary artist based between Buffalo, New York, and Toronto, Ontario, whose work focuses on questions of Black masculinity as it intersects with Muslim, queer and trans identities. Osman’s practice has been concerned with representing and complicating the gaps evident in hegemonic or normative representations of Black/African peoples to unsettle and broaden ideas about what Blackness is, was, and can be. He has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions, biennale, festivals, screenings, and programs across North America and internationally. His writing on art has appeared in BlackFlash, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, PUBLIC Journal, Transitions, Journal on Images and Culture, among other publications. Osman is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Art at SUNY Buffalo..

Participating Curators

Kevin Dumouchelle, Curator, National Museum of African Art. Curator, Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art. Editor, Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art (Smithsonian Books, 2026, in press.)

Serubiri Moses, Curator, Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art. https://curatorsintl.org/collaborators/7349-serubiri-moses

Participating Artists

Leilah Babirye, Featured work: Nosamba II, from the Kuchu Ngagi (Antelope) Clan, 2021

Paul Emmanuel, artist (Johannesburg, South Africa) Featured work: Untethered/Retethered, 2025 (See close looking guide at: https://markauslander.com/2026/02/05/close-looking-guide-to-paul-emmanuels-untethered-retethered-multimedia-video-installation-2025/

Ṣọlá Olúlòde, artist (Brixton, UK) Featured works: Ode to Joy; Stitched to You.

Tobi Onabolu is a London-born artist-filmmaker, writer, and cultural producer, based in Grand Popo, Benin Republic. His interdisciplinary practice spans moving image, installation, performance, sound, and the creation of long-term cultural platforms, approaching art as a living process rather than the production of isolated objects. Director of Dear Black Child . See: https://tobionabolu.com/dearblackchild/ (Photo credit: Elijah Ndoumbe.)

Participating Scholars

Lwando Scott holds a PhD in Sociology, and is currently a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar with a focus on gender and sexualities, on how these categories must be linked to ideas of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. Scott is interested in the nature of post-apartheid freedom, in thinking with and through the South African Constitution, to upend legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racial domination whose effects extend into the contemporary moment. Thus, Scott’s scholarship is engaged in the complex ways gender and sexuality are sometimes omitted in discussions on the legacies of colonialism and apartheid and the impact of this omission on contemporary understanding of these categories.

Musoke Nalwoga is an independent curator and researcher with a focus on contemporary art. Born and raised in Uganda, she currently lives and works between Amsterdam, and Antwerp. Nalwoga’s curatorial practice is forging new institutional structures that hack, subvert, and productively add to the systems that exhibit, exchange, and archive the specific art (his)stories of African diaspora. Nalwoga is the founding director of MOTORMOND; a black queer Art Space that is dedicated to circulating critically grounded Pan Diasporic Cultures. Nalwoga has been appointed as co-curator of the Noorderlicht Photography Biennale 2027.

Alavor Luis Alima. Assistant Professor of African Art, University of Florida

Close Looking Guides to “Here”

The students and faculty in Dr Auslander’s Anth 215 (Gender, Sexuality, Culture) at American University are developing close looking guides to the art work in the HERE exhibition: