The Past/Future as a form of Resistance event will be pre-recorded presenting responses from Sonya Dyer, Alexandria Smith & Tanoa Sasraku to Peter Spanjer and the RCA Contemporary Art Practice cohort – who have been working on a series of events focusing around the idea and forms of Resistance.
You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
Register in advance for this webinar:
https://rca-ac.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Acc57FLPSTOBTRg9VsGdog
Zoom is a free online App which can be downloaded to your computer/laptop, phone or tablet via this website: www.zoom.us
We will also live stream it via twitch.tv/soah_rca_2020
Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London, and is a Somerset House Studios Resident.
Hailing Frequencies Open (HFO), her ongoing body of work, intersects the Greek myth of Andromeda, the dubious genesis and extraordinary legacy of HeLa cells and actor Nichelle Nicols’ pioneering work in diversifying the NASA astronaut pool in the 1970s - combining social justice with speculation, fantasy with the political.
She recently defended her PhD thesis exploring Black female subjectivities within fictional narratives of the future at Middlesex University. Recent exhibitions and projects include Art Night London: Trailers (2020), Rewriting The Future, Site Gallery (2019), Another World is Possible, CAMP, Copenhagen (2018), Or, Dark Fecundity, The Centre for Afrofuturist Studies, USA (2018) and The Claudia Jones Space Station, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, (2017).
As a writer and commentator on art and culture, Dyer has contributed to numerous books, journals and publications including Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, Frieze, Arts UK, Contemporary & and a-n online. Dyer is a Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program alum.
Alexandria Smith is a mixed media visual artist based in London and New York. She earned her BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University; MA in Art Education from New York University; and MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2018-2019 Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, the Virginia A. Myers Fellowship at the University of Iowa and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. She has been awarded residenciesinclude MacDowell, Bemis, Yaddo and LMCC Process Space.
Smith’s recent exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibit, Monuments to an Effigy at the Queens Museum inNYC; a solo exhibition, In Praise of Shadows at Anna ZorinaGallery in NYC; a site-specific commission for The deCordovaBiennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and a site-specific commission for the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. She was also included in a major painting survey exhibition at Mass MoCA entitled The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night.
Born in 1995 and raised in Plymouth, Devon, Tanoa Sasraku works with themes examining the intersection of her dual identity as a British-Ghanaian, her identity as a young, queer woman and the endeavour to draw these senses of self together as one in 21st century England.
