Barbara Prezeau Stephenson, born in 1965 in Port-au-Prince, is a visual artist and cultural activist. She exhibits in several museums around the world, including the Monterey Museum in California, the Museum of Modern Art in San Diego, the Frost Art Museum in Florida, the Grand Palais Museum in Paris, the Haitian Art Museum and the MUPANAH. She represents Haiti at the Biennales in Havana, Dakar, Venice, Mercosur, Brazil and Caracas. In addition to her artistic creation, Barbara Prézeau Stephenson has always been very active in the Haitian and Caribbean cultural community.
She created the AfricAméricA Foundation in Haiti (1999). The cultural centre of the same name, now transformed into the Georges Liautaud Community Museum, is located in the heart of the Village Artistique de Noailles in Croix-des-Bouquets. Since 2000, she has been organizing the Transcultural Forum of Contemporary Art in Haiti. These first international, multidisciplinary meetings quickly took the form of biennales. He has written numerous articles and books on contemporary art in the Caribbean and Haiti, as well as an essay in the field of cultural economics. Barbara Prézeau Stephenson is now a reference in the Caribbean cultural sector, and her works are part of the main contemporary art collections in this region of the world.
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This seminar proposes to reflect on the driving roles of artistic forms, practices and knowledge in the development and circulation of political structures, movements, ideologies and imaginations on the African continent and in its diasporas. Our work will focus on the visual and performing arts in the broadest sense of the term (dance, theatre, visual arts, photography, cinema, music, literature, digital arts...) and will be part of a critical and transdisciplinary approach. Anthropology, history, art history, political science, visual and material cultures, colonial, postcolonial, decolonial and diasporic studies of Africa... will rub shoulders and question each other. The sessions will be structured around presentations by researchers and/or practitioners - artists, cultural actors, activists. Diverse and reflecting a wide range of points of view, the work and approaches presented will have in common that working (on) the intersections between art and politics requires a commitment on the basis of which reflection and theorization are required.
Thematic of the 2018-2019 cycle: Future Africa
Future or, better still, future. The future of cities, ecologies, gender constructions; the future of technology and science; violence - political, economic, social; hope; the very notions of the future... Thinking, saying, giving substance to these and other related futures from Africa: these are the tasks that plastic artists set themselves through their practices and thoughts.ne.s, filmmakers, performers and writers, philosophers and researchers, curators and cultural activists who will be participating in the seminar in 2018-2019. Committed, indocilious, even radical, the proposals they develop undermine apriori and doxas.