2019 Program

RAW Material Company is delighted to announce its 2019 program, including artists residencies, public forums, upcoming sessions of RAW Académie and exhibitions, with new friends and old. We look forward to evermore learning, growing, questioning and collaborating and wish a very happy and fruitful 2019 to all.

Residencies
RAW Material Company’s residency program started in 2011 and has welcomed more than 50 art practitioners, in Dakar. The residency program is open to visual artists interested in any medium, as well as to writers, curators, musicians, filmmakers, architects, researchers or doctoral researchers.

We are pleased to welcome scholar Dana Liljegren (United States) and artists Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin (France) for the January to March residency cycle. In June and July, we will welcome curator and founding director of CCA Tel Aviv, Sergio Edelsztein (Argentina and Israel).

Public FORUMS
Fridays @RAW is a constellation of weekly public events that offer a platform for reflection and debate around artistic and curatorial practice, architecture and urbanism, and society and cinema. The program is built around four thematic components and is organized in collaboration with local practitioners and experts in their fields:

Citéologies, with architect Carole Diop, is a program of reflection and research on politics of architecture and urbanism in African cities.
Parlons Sénégalaiseries, with satirist and journalist Ibou Fall, is a series of debates and discussions on Senegalese society in particular and contemporary African life in general.
RAW Ciné-club, with cultural journalist and film critic Aboubacar Demba Cissokho, is a cycle of film screenings followed by conversations.
Vox-ARTIS, organized with art critic Massamba Mbaye, is a unique moment for artists to share their work, to present and open a window onto their practice for the public.

In 2019 we will continue our regular <B/Look Club> reading group, a coming together where dialogue and debate are encouraged through activating our library resources, be they text, image or film.

RAW Académie
RAW Académie is an experimental residential program for the research and study of artistic and curatorial practice and thought. The programme takes place over 7 to 8 weeks in Dakar. It is dedicated to a dynamic reflection on artistic research, curatorial practice and critical writing. The Académie is held during two distinct sessions per year; March–May and October–December.

Session 6, CURA, directed by founding artistic director of RAW Material Company Koyo Kouoh, will begin on March 18 and will end on May 10.

CURA is the result of RAW Material Company’s collaborative reflection after five sessions of the Académie program. It is a session dedicated to curatorial practice as a contemporary cultural currency, and as social and political agency. Curating as a way to write and re-write histories, a way to read the present and imagine all possible futures. A method to change the meaning of things, and thus our readings thereof. Curating as a tool to occupy spaces and to interact with works of art. Curating as a model to be, to live, and to think with and through art and artists, in proximity to them and what they make, from their studios to the exhibition formats of their choice. Faculty will include Zoe Butt, Diana Campbell Betancourt, Princesse Marilyn Douala Manga Bell, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adrienne Edwards, Reem Fadda, Kate Fowle, Natasha Ginwala, Samuel Leuenberger, Chus Martinez, Gabi Ngcobo, Ruth Noack, Maria Lind, Miguel A. López, Marion Louisgrand Sylla and WHW.

Session 7, Images for our times, directed by political scientist, artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire (France), will begin on October 28 and will end on December 13.  

Raw Académie 7 will focus on film, on the images and sounds for our times. These are times in which many of the certainties that gave us guidance have been upended. With this in mind, we will ask; what are the new ways to see, to hear and to share that can help us question the urgencies of the present, not so much to explain them but to question ourselves in the face of them and find alternative paths of understanding and action. Seven weeks to reflect on the relationship between art and actuality, between images and events, fiction and reality.

Throughout the session, fellows will produce and discuss the potentialities of images and sounds. Together, we will watch a film a day: films authored by the visiting faculty, and those that have inspired their practice. We will consider film as a means of resistance, a tool to generate critical forms and ideas, a medium for creating a common experience, rethinking duration, and confronting the complex and generative relationship between the image and the real. Faculty will include John Akomfrah, Mati Diop, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige and Alfredo Jaar alongside film scholar Nicole Brenez.

Exhibitions

PO4 (Blackout) by Christian Danielewitz
June 7 to July 5

PO4 (Blackout) is an exhibition that forms part of Danish artist Christian Danielewitz’s ongoing research on the socio-ecological wreckage caused by global industries of resource extraction. During a prior residency with RAW Material Company in Dakar, Danielewitz focused his research on the mining of phosphate, a mineral that, in different forms, is essential to all life on earth. Mined extensively in Senegal, current rates of extraction suggest that worldwide phosphate resources will be depleted in maximum one century. Beyond concerns for the resource’s future, we must also cast our attention to the toxic spoils of its production cycle. The sulphuric acid used to dissolve phosphate rock is increasingly present in the atmosphere of villages in mining zones, leading to chronic health problems amongst local populations, spoilt harvests and rapid material degradation of the built environment. The same mineral that is mined for fertilizer, a life giver, is responsible for the weakening of chains of nutrition on a local level. Danielewitz exposes this irony and its impact in an installation that bears witness to the devastation experienced in the village of Gad Gomene, situated near the open pit phosphate mines of Taiba, Senegal. 

International

Curatorial seminar with The Artist's Institute, Hunter College, New York City
RAW Material Company will organize a curatorial seminar with Master's students of Hunter College, between Dakar and New York. As part of the program, RAW’s Koyo Kouoh will be lecturing at Hunter College in mid-May.

Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
October 11, 2019 to January 6, 2020

RAW Material Company’s 2018 exhibition All of the wrongs that were in the world, I gathered them up will travel to Berlin in October 2019 as part of the multi-stage project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology under the artistic direction of Diedrich Diedrichsen and Anselm Franke.

Partners 
We are pleased to have recently developed a new and exciting partnership with Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).

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