Join us for a breakfast conversation between artist and curator
This event is free and open to all.
Buhlebezwe Siwani
Buhlebezwe Siwani works with performance, photography, sculpture and installation. Siwani’s work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and black female experience within the South African context. As an initiated Sangoma, a spiritual healer that works within the space of the death and the living, Siwani focused her artistic practice into rituality and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality. Central to her work is her own body, which operates in multiple registers as subject, object, form, medium, material, language and site. Her work can be described, although not literally, as the documentation of a diverse set of performances, which are rendered through video, photography, sculpture, installation and works on paper. Each of her projects deals with the relationship between ancestral rituals and modern life, touching social and political topics, such as the female body, black communities, histories of colonisation and the paradoxes of our contemporary society, all seen through the filter of the artist’s own biography and experience. Buhlebezwe Siwani was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and currently lives and works between Cape Town and Amsterdam.
Christine Eyene
Christine Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. She is Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool.
From 2012 to March 2022, Eyene was a Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire where she worked on Making Histories Visible, a multidisciplinary visual arts research project led by Lubaina Himid, Professor of Contemporary Art and 2017 Turner Prize winner. In this framework, Eyene developed new research on feminism, sound art, and photography. She recently completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, on the relationship between African literature and visual representation in the work of South African photographer George Hallett (1942-2020) under the supervision of Professor Annie E. Coombes.
Eyene’s areas of research and curatorial practice encompass contemporary African and Diaspora arts, feminism, photography, and non-object-based art practices notably sound art. Her other interests include: socially-engaged initiatives, urban culture, music, design, and new media.