Mutiny documentary now available: Black British West Indies’ experience of WW1

“Mutiny” a documentary resource on the Black British West Indian experience of WW1 created by Sweet Patootee, is now on general release for streaming audiences – beginning with Vimeo on Demand. 

A story of WW1 and the Black struggle for pride and freedom.  Eyewitness testimonies of veterans, official documents, and archive photos reveal the incredible story of the British West Indies Regiment. 'Mutiny' includes extracts from unique video oral testimonies of WW1 era Black British West Indian women and veterans, that have inspired our latest work ‘Turning Point’.

For more information please visit the Sweet Patootee website. 

New displays of African collections: Aso-oke, a Celebration of Style & Townships Journeys

Brighton Museum & Art Gallery are delighted to present two new displays highlighting rich and evolving fashion and identity practices in Africa. These displays have been co-curated with researchers from the African diaspora who live in Sussex. They are part of the Object Journeys Fashioning Africa project in partnership with the British Museum.

On display are post 1960’s textiles and garments collected as part of the Fashioning Africa project, historic African textiles and beadwork from Brighton Museum’s collections and objects on loan from the British Museum. Four films accompany the displays. These feature in-depth interviews with the curators, footage of the production of aso-oke fabric and of some of the displayed outfits in use.

The displays have been co-curated by Edith Ojo, Tshepo Skwambane and world art collection staff, and supported by the British Museum. Through the process of co-curation, Edith and Tshepo have shared their cultural knowledge, expertise and experiences of growing up in Africa, to provide new interpretations for the displays and to breathe new life into historic African objects.

Edith Ojo with the Aso-Oke display (c) RPMAG

Aso-oke, a Celebration of Style, curated by Edith, showcases aso-oke fabric and fashion and reflects Edith’s rich Yoruba, Nigerian heritage and the role aso-oke plays in this. She states “It says party, that’s what aso-oke says to me. I love the spectacle and performance that surrounds aso-oke. It’s so culturally vibrant and constantly evolving.”

 

Tshepo Skwambane with Township Journeys (c) RPMAG

Township Journeys, curated by Tshepo Skwambane, demonstrates the important role that fashion and identity played for black South Africans living in townships. The display reflects Tshepo’s childhood experiences growing up in a township during apartheid, and the rich cultural mix of people he encountered there. He states “I want to challenge and dismantle stereotypes about Africa and Africans. Apartheid enforced separate and defined communities, but you can’t stop interaction between people and ideas.” 

 

Fashioning Africa is a Heritage Lottery Fund Collecting Cultures project. With the support of a collecting panel, Brighton Museum has been able to acquire new objects that reflect post-1960 African fashion identities.

This display is part of Object Journeys, a national programme run by the British Museum and supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It supports community partners to research and explore museum collections and create new displays in response to this investigation.

Keti Koti Talks : Perspectives on the Slavery Past and its Afterlife

Keti Koti Talks : Perspectives on the Slavery Past and its Afterlife SUNDAY 1 JULY 2018 | OOSTERPARK  Boni Tula stage | Free entrance | 4.45 pm - 5.45 pm Perspectives on the Slavery Past and its Afterlife is a series of short lectures presented during Keti Koti that explores the link between the Dutch slavery past and current structures of power, exclusion, and inequality. Slavery as a dehumanizing practice created structures of relations that still live with us today. Like other former colonial powers, the Netherlands owes its wealth and elevated position in the world, in large measure, to its past colonial activities. This power and privilege came at a specific cost to the formerly colonized and enslaved: the Africans that were captured, enslaved, and subjected to a brutal process of dehumanization. The same Africans that facilitated a thriving (plantation) economic system in the Dutch Caribbean, that generated wealth for individual owners and their descendants, as well as for the Dutch Metropole. How do we repair a history that is not yet acknowledged for its complexities, nor considered a shared past? Within the context of the Keti Koti commemoration and celebration, the Research Center for Material Culture invites an interdisciplinary group of thinkers, designers and artists to share their critical perspectives on the legacies of slavery and the colonial past in contemporary Dutch society. These talks give insight into how different sets of practices connect and how the legacies of slavery and the colonial past manifest in the present. This event takes place at the Keti Koti Festival at the Oosterpark and is a prelude to the exhibition on slavery and colonialism (medio 2021) at the Tropenmuseum. This exhibition explores the Dutch history of slavery and colonialism, and its afterlives in the present, through the lens – the experiences - of the enslaved and their descendants. More than a series of facts, or the expected telling of the triangle trade, the exhibition zooms in on the condition of enslavement, the (cultural) responses of the enslaved, and the experiences of those living slavery’s afterlife in present-day Dutch society. SPEAKERS and PERFORMERS Researcher Mark Ponte (Stadsarchief) Lecturer Grace Ndjako (Universiteit Amsterdam) Barby Asante (curator and artist) Moderator: Aspha Bijnaar (independent researcher) Keti Koti stories by Bibi Fadlalla (filmmaker)

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Research   |   Events   |  Open space

Creating African Fashion Histories

Creating African Fashion Histories

A conference hosted by Royal Pavilion & Museums

with the Sussex Africa Centre / University of Sussex

and the University of Brighton

 

The Old Courtroom, 118 Church Street, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Wednesday 2 November 2016

 

Coinciding with the first major UK exhibition dedicated to contemporary African fashion, Fashion Cities Africa, this one-day conference will explore the possibilities and limitations of dress and fashion history to discuss current and past narratives in African fashion.

 

Panels will focus on the construction of African fashion histories; the role of African diasporas in the translation of African fashions; new directions in collecting and curating African fashion and the evolution of new platforms for the dissemination of African fashion.

 

Speakers include Hannah Pool (author, Fashion Cities Africa, curator of Africa Utopia), Helen Jennings (author, New African Fashion), Carol Tulloch (author, The Birth of

Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora), Erica de Greef, Angela M Jansen (author, Moroccan Fashion, Design, Tradition and Modernity), Heather Akou (author, The Politics of Dress in Somali Culture) and Victoria Rovine (author, African Fashion, Global Style).

 

For booking and more information:

www.brightonmuseums.org.uk/cafh

03000 290902

Pacific Worlds – a reflection of good practice at the Oakland Museum of California

‘A man with elaborate tattoos in Huahine, Leeward Islands, French Polynesia. © Michel Renaudeau/age fotostock’

My doctoral research on museums and their work with diaspora communities recently involved me interviewing museum staff in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was especially struck by the activities of Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) in this respect and wanted to take the chance to update MEG members on OMCA’s forthcoming exhibition, Pacific Worlds (30 May 2015 - 3 January 2016).

OMCA is the result of the mid-1960s merger of three civic institutions – the Oakland Public Museum, the Oakland Art Gallery and the Snow Museum of Natural History. At the point of merger the divergent aims and collections of these organisations were refined to an emphasis on telling the story of California. The strong sense of public purpose and interest in innovative practice shared by the three organisations, however, would continue to inform the development of OMCA and is much in evidence today.

At the time of the merger some of the inherited collections seemed to speak more clearly to the new mission than others. The Oceanic collection – encompassing some 3,000 objects many of which were collected by Oakland dentist John Rabe who travelled the Pacific in the 1880s and 1890s – initially seemed anomalous and thus, as one of several ‘legacy’ collections, had not been on display since 1965. More recently an increasing awareness of the Bay Area’s long-established but largely overlooked Pacific Islander communities and the chance to mark this year’s 100^th anniversary of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) held in San Francisco led to a review of OMCA’s Oceanic holdings and to the development of the Pacific Worlds exhibition. The exhibition aims to highlight the presence of California’s Pacific Islander ‘neighbours’ – the nearly 300,000 Pacific Islanders who live within in the state as well as those on the other side of the Pacific Ocean – and to turn ‘the familiar idea of California as the western frontier on its head and re-position the State as “the East Coast of the Pacific”’ (OMCA press release, 6 November 2014).

The exhibition development process was informed by a community advisory task force of individuals well-connected within their Pacific Islander communities. The task force helped shape the focus and structure of the exhibition so as to reflect community concerns including a desire to connect objects to family stories and a commitment to the re-invigoration of historic cultural practices. Within the exhibition personal narratives will be brought to the fore through a series of large-scale photographic portraits of Pacific Islanders and films of cultural practitioners, and cultural dynamism reflected through commissions, including of tapa, a traditional Tongan outfit and a Hawaiian featherwork standard (kāhili).

Pacific Worlds demonstrates much that is to be admired about OMCA not least its commitment to using its historical collections as the basis for generating new knowledge through dialogue with diaspora communities, a commitment reflected in the organisation’s policy, structure and practice and in its curators’ genuine pursuit of collaborative scholarship. My thanks to OMCA staff – Louise Pubols (Senior Curator of History), Suzanne Fischer (Associate Curator, Contemporary History and Trends) and Christine Lashaw (Experience Developer) – for the time they spent with me. Thanks also to the Santander University of Brighton Travel Grants Scheme and to the University of Brighton Centre for Research & Development College Research Student Fund for making my visit possible.

Helen Mears, Keeper of World Art, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, April 2015.

Pacific Worlds will be on display at The Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak Street, Oakland, California, US, 30 May 2015 - 3 January 2016. See museumca.org for further details.