Queering Kinship and Visioning Belonging in African Diasporic Women's Art

In this talk, Dr. Bimbola Akinbola explores interrelationality and diasporic intimacy in the visual and performance art of Wura-Natasha Ogunji and ruby onyinyechi amanze. Looking to Ogunji and amanze’s collaborative performances, as well as amanze’s mixed media drawings, Dr. Akinbola considers the connections between Ogunji and amanze’s shared making practice and friendship, arguing that within their reations, Ogunji and amanze expand, queer, and reinvent community and kinship.

Register for this event →

In order to ensure the timeliness of confirmation emails with Zoom link information, this registration link expires at 5:00 pm central time on April 4, 2022. Those who have registered for the event during this timeframe will receive an email from the Department of Art and Art History with Zoom information the day before the event. Please contact Jill Velez at jill.velez@austin.utexas.edu for assistance. 
 

Bimbola Akinbola is Chicago-based artist and an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Working at the intersection of African diaspora studies, performance, visual culture, and postcolonial theory, Dr. Akinbola’s creative and scholarly work is concerned with kinship and belonging, gender performance, and affect in the African diaspora.

Dr. Akinbola is currently working on her first book manuscript, which examines the creative work of contemporary Nigerian diasporic women artists whose work, she argues, strategically utilizes disbelonging as a critical tool and worldmaking strategy. Her work has been published in Academics, Artists, and Museums: 21st-Century Partnerships published by Routledge, Text and Performance Quarterly, and she has an essay about the work of Zina Saro–Wiwa forthcoming in Women Studies Quarterly.

Dr. Akinbola is also a practicing visual and performance artist who work has been shown at venues such as Center on Halsted, The Riverside Arts Center, Compound Yellow, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and was Northwestern’s 2018–2020 Black Performing Arts Postdoctoral Fellow.