Salon Series: demystifying African art
Monday 21 November 2016 6.30 - 8pm
The Academicians’ Room, The Keeper’s House, Royal Academy of Arts
£20. Call 020 7300 8090 to book.
Join the Salon Series in its second season as we explore the growing success of African art.
The Salon Series is the Academicians’ Room’s series of curated talks, envisaged as a platform to discuss arts and culture through the insight of brilliant speakers from diverse and fascinating backgrounds. The first of these talks will address African art, delving into its exciting and growing contemporary art scene.
African art is a name with a big meaning. Used as a terminology in the art world to define art and artists from the continent, African art encompasses many local and sub-regional realities with as many differences as similarities. With an increased interest in the region in the recent years, African art has moved beyond its continental boundaries and landed in many of the art world’s capitals. With one art fair entirely devoted to the continent, and several specialised galleries and artists from the diaspora based in London as well as a strong auction house presence, African art has become a global phenomenon with many ramifications. This talk will explore this extraordinary cluster, from its origins and meaning, to its long artistic history and its protagonists, and the repercussion and influences in London and abroad.
The panel will include contributions from Maria Varnava (Director, Tiwani Contemporary, London), and Hannah O’Leary (Director and Head of Modern African art at Sotheby’s), with Osei Bonsu (independent curator and writer) as moderator.
Call 020 7300 8090 to book; or, if you're an Academicians' Room member, you can fill in a booking form by following the 'book now' link.
Hannah O’Leary
Head of Modern African Art at Sotheby's
Having completed a Master’s degree in History of Art with Cultural Anthropology, Hannah O’Leary first joined Sotheby’s in 2005, initially working in the Dublin and Melbourne offices. In 2006 she joined Bonhams in London, where she helped pioneer the first international auctions of South African art (in 2007) and modern and contemporary African art (2009), becoming Head of Department in 2010. Her first auction as head of department, the South African sale in March 2011, totalled over £8.7million and remains the highest grossing sale of South African art ever to have been held worldwide. Hannah was also instrumental in obtaining world record prices for all major African artists, including El Anatsui, Ben Enwonwu, Gerard Sekoto, Aboudia and Abdoulaye Konate.
Hannah maintains close relationships with private collectors and public institutions alike, often advising on their collections and assisting with private sales and exhibition loans, most recently as international consultant to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg.
Osei Bonsu
Independent curator and writer
Osei Bonsu is a British-Ghanaian curator, writer and cultural producer based in London. His activities encompass exhibition programming, publishing and strategy in the field of visual arts. He has developed projects focused on transnational histories of art, collaborating with museums, private collections and other institutions in Europe, Asia and North Africa. Through his research, Bonsu focuses on questions of progress and the conception of modernity against the backdrop of social, cultural, and economical transformation in the 20th and 21st centuries.
His writing has been included in a number of exhibition catalogs including the 56th Venice Biennale – All the World’s Futures curated by Okwui Enwezor and Germano Celant’s Arts and Foods, Rituals Since 1851 at La Triennale di Milano, Italy. He played a key role in the development of Europe's first fair for African art, 1:54 (2013 - 14), and advised the Saatchi Collection on its acquisitions of new work from sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in 2015. In 2017, he will curate a solo presentation by South African artist Dineo Bopape Seshee at Collective Gallery (Scotland) and the multi-site exhibition The Economy of Living Things at CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux and Jeu de Paume in Paris.