In the Year of the Quiet Sun
- Submitting institution
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Goldsmiths' College
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3211
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Bergen Kunsthalle, Delfina Foundation, Casco
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- January
- Year of first exhibition
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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V - Visual Cultures
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This solo-exhibition comprised 4 installations which experimented with animation, video, interior decor, display-system, and reading room, accompanied by a 176-page artist publication. Drawing on novel theoretical, historical, archival and practice-based research, also conducted collaboratively over several years with Iaspis, Stockholm and Iniva, London, it shed new light on scholarly research and public understanding of mid-20th Century Pan-African statecraft by analysing the role of masscult artifacts including postage stamps issued to commemorate the independence of African nation-states ("postal politics"), and magazines, notably the by poet and editor Rajat Neogy’s controversial periodical Transition ("magazine diplomacy").
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Based on unique archival, historical, and theoretical research, the solo-exhibition, In the Year of the Quiet Sun (Bergen Kunsthalle, Delfina Foundation, Casco: 2014-15) examines moments of mid-twentieth-century Pan-Africanism’s liberatory project as activated through mass-cultural formations. Employing animation, video, interior decor, display-system, reading room and publication, its constituent works operate as peculiar anomalies that summon forces of indexicality and iconicity from the aspirations, alibis and abuses of sovereignty emergent in the fields of postal politics, imperial infrastructure and magazine diplomacy._x000D_
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The installation Statecraft (2014), envisions the short century of decolonization as a political calendar assembled from the medium of the postage stamp. These masscult artifacts, issued to commemorate the independence of African nation-states, from Liberia in 1847 to South Sudan in 2011, and integrated into an elaborate display system, reveal the convergence of Pan-Africanist Pop with Social Realist portraiture. Statecraft approaches the postage stamp less as a witness to history in the making than as a form of evil media that elevates the sovereignty of dictators and revolutionaries alike._x000D_
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The essay film (also called) In the Year of the Quiet Sun (2013) references the decrease in solar surface temperature that occurs every eleven years. It examines the stamps issued by nation states globally between November 1964-November 1965 to commemorate the first scientific expedition to study the sun against the unstable backdrop of Africa’s newly independent states. Conceived by The Otolith Group and animated by ScanLab, Sovereign Sisters (2014) mobilises Rene de Saint-Marceaux’s 1907 monument to the Universal Postal Union into a digital hymn to the automatism of planetary infrastructure. One Out of Many Afrophilias (2014) evokes the energies of the controversial Transition magazine, founded in 1961 in Kampala, Uganda, by poet and editor Rajat Neogy. A 176-page artist publication, World 3, was also published.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -