Paul Pfeiffer and Languid Hands will be in conversation with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa on 1 July at 7pm GMT, in ‘Figuring the Invisible: anti-Blackness, Art & Testimony.’

To follow Anne Anlin Cheng, what happens when we ‘shift our attention away from the visibility of race to its visuality?’

What happens when we attend to the strategic modes of appearance within the visible developed by racialised subjects, or modelled to us through their art? What happens when we consider racialised forms of visuality and aurality as tactics designed not solely to evade racialised violence, but as methods of manifesting and mobilising subaltern histories, and embodied forms of knowing?

How should we respond to the grammars of black performance – in word, image and sound – as practices of knowing? How do we respond to the ongoingness of truths known to racialised subjects that are nevertheless inadmissible within the normative strictures of ‘proof,’ or the standard forms of documentary practice?

These questions will be taken up in a discussion between Paul Pfeiffer and Languid Hands, moderated by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, in a panel that centres around a screening of Pfeiffer’s ‘The Long Count’ (I Shook Up The World, 2000), Caryatid (Broner, 2020), and Languid Hands’s Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace (2019).

Pictured: Paul Pfeiffer, ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (15)’, 2004.