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OSCAM – Open Space Contemporary Art Museum, Amsterdam-Zuidoost
Bijlmerplein 110, 1102 DB Amsterdam, Netherlands

 Exhibition

27 October 2021 19.00–05 March 2022 18.00

OSCAM – Open Space Contemporary Art Museum, Amsterdam-Zuidoost  

Exhibition Black Manifesto: On the Road to Black Emancipation

An Exhibition and Public Program at OSCAM – Open Space Contemporary Art Museum, Amsterdam-Zuidoost

Opening: 27 October 2021, 19.00

Please note: the venue for this exhibition is OSCAM – Open Space Contemporary Art Museum

[Update: now extended to 5 March 2022!]

Exhibition Black Manifesto: On the Road to Black Emancipation brings together artists, writers, and other cultural workers who engage with Black Manifesto—a living document with advice and demands from and for the Netherlands’s Black communities on tackling racism and inequality. Artworks, essays and text excerpts, and public programs accompany and expand the manifesto, emerging as a collective declaration of both the resistance to racism and possibility of radical Black emancipation.

The contributors to the exhibition include artists Chimira Obiefule, Rossel Chaslie, and duo Jonathan Hoost and Youandi, and writers Akú Anan, Bart Krieger, Jillian Emanuels, Munganyende Hélène Christelle, Phaedra Haringsma, Princess Attia, and Sherilyn Deen. Other cultural workers join the project’s accompanying program throughout the course of the project.

Black Manifesto emerged from different groups and movements that came together in June 2020, when more than 50,000 people took to the streets in all provinces of the Netherl and during the Black Lives Matter protests. Building on the anti-Zwarte Piet struggle, which has made a significant stand against institutional and anti-Black racism over the last ten years, the manifesto gathers momentum within the growing understanding that the Netherlands must confront the legacy of its colonial past and present injustices.

In this context, Exhibition Black Manifesto: On the Road to Black Emancipation underscores the artistic and research-based contributions that fight through deep-rooted structures of inequality and extend to all fields of civic life. The exhibition gives visual and creative expression to Black Manifesto and presents multiple perspectives of Black communities in the Netherlands, outlining strategies of resisting and insisting on the sustained momentum necessary for bringing about change.

Presented at OSCAM – Open Space Contemporary Art Museum, Amsterdam-Zuidoost from 27 October 2021 to 16 January 2022, the exhibition is accompanied by several programs, workshops, and other opportunities to encounter the movement and the manifesto. For more information, and to sign up for the opening on 27 October 2021, see the following link to the website of The Black Archives.

The exhibition issues from the open call Manifesting Systemic Change Through Creative Waves in 2020, co-organized by Nederland Wordt Beter, New Urban Collective/The Black Archives, and Black Queer & Trans Resistance NL (supporting organizations of KOZP) in collaboration with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

Address:
OSCAM – Open Space Contemporary Art Museum
Bijlmerplein 110
1102 DB Amsterdam

In collaboration with

Suggestions from the archive

Learning

10 May, 12.00–12 May, 18.00 2023

Complaint Making: Setting Up Conflict-Positive Spaces for Community Building Praxis

Vishnu would like to share feminist governance tools (FGT) focused on three of many tiers in community building praxis. FGT is based on the values of equity with an emphasis on creating psychologically safe environments, drawing on the use of consent. Decision-making processes, setting up conflict-positive spaces, and complaint-making as diversity work will form the body of this three-day training. Rooted in Vishnu’s autho-ethnographic practice, this work will explore the power dynamics that impact decision-making processes.

Performative

10 May, 12.00–12 May, 18.00 2023

The Diamond Mind II

In this dance training, the people will use a one-minute film of their own movement as material for a booklet—a sixteen page signature—that distributes their presence, their gesture, as an act of EQ. 

Learning

3 May, 12.00–4 May, 18.00 2023

Too Late To Say Sorry? 

A bad apology can ruin a friendship, destroy a community, or end a career. In this workshop, we will investigate the impact of apologies on our relationships and our worlds. Why and how do we make apologies? What can giving and receiving apologies teach us about values and integrity? Should you apologize for something you don’t really feel sorry for? We will explore conflict and how we like to be in conflict with others. We will dive into our own boundaries. We will seek to understand how honoring limits becomes an act of building (or freeing) better worlds capable of holding so many, many more of us.

Learning

28 April, 12.00–29 April, 18.00 2023

Huisje, Boompje, Beestje (D.A.F.O.N.T.)

In this rare masterclass, retired teacher and artist Glenda Martinus teaches participants a thing or two about painting with Microsoft Word. Martinus shares tips, tricks, and secrets on how to use this software to its unexpected potential as a drawing tool. Participants learn how to draw three basic objects—a house, a tree, and an animal—in a seemingly innocent exercise that perhaps contains more layered social commentary. Drawing the worlds we desire does not require expensive tools or education, simply a curiosity to understand how the monster’s tools can topple the house of the master.