Roaming PanAfrican Biennial?

[nikki]

Just got this press release. Sounds like they are trying to plan a 'roaming' PanAfrican biennial for visual art. It will be interesting to see which artists/curators will be chosen, in addition to which cities it will 'roam' to...It's actually an interesting idea that I would be curious to see how something like that could manifest in the states among more emerging/unknown artists. Something to ponder...

Bringing you the answers before we know the question: four positions regarding the idea of a pan-African roaming biennialSymposium, October 10, 2010, Murcia (Spain)
Confirmed speakers : N'gone Fall, Senam Okudzeto, Thembinkosi Goniwe and Christine Eyene.
The Incubator for a Pan-African Roaming Biennial is a year-long task-force consisting of Gabi Ngcobo from the Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR) in Johannesburg, Mia Jankowicz from the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) in Cairo, Jimmy Ogonga from the Center for Contemporary Art of East Africa (CCAEA) in Nairobi and Khadija El Bennaoui from Art Moves Africa (AMA). The Incubator has been set-up in response to a proposal by Bassam El Baroni and Jeremy Beaudry of Alexandria Contemporary Art Forum (ACAF), as an extension to the political issues raised by OVERSCORE, their curatorial contribution to Manifesta 8, and the intellectual territory it covers.

The project aims to facilitate the articulation of critical positions regarding the notion of a pan-African, roaming art biennial. The Incubator will avoid assumptions or simple assessments of what a biennial looks like, what is its context, what effect it has, and whether it can even be done. The Incubator will identify and bring together perspectives from curators, artists, cultural producers and active sponsors, whose current activities reveal the desire to find room for autonomy and progressive experimentation within their respective contexts. Articulating this research should bring together a set of historically and politically informed viewpoints, while paying attention to infrastructure and pragmatic issues. These will happen through several means: the symposium taking place during the opening of Manifesta 8; a website; a workshop which will take place in an African city in April 2011; the appointment of key voices as planners; the production of a publication in September 2011. The Incubator and its platforms should register these positions as an (uneven) landscape upon which others may imagine a new biennial, a roaming biennial, an alternative structure or a model responding to a different set of priorities entirely.

More information about the Incubator will soon be found on: http://www.panafricannial.org