Colloquium Series: Kiyan Williams & Kathryn Yusoff

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Please join us for our next NYU GSAS Music Colloquium, featuring Kiyan Williams and Kathryn Yusoff.

Kiyan Williams: What the soil remembers

Artist and scholar Kiyan Williams frequently collaborates with soil as material and metaphor to unearth Afro Diaspotic history and trans/gressive subjectivities. In this artist talk they connect their practice to a tradition of artists working with soil to imagine decolonial futures.

Kiyan Williams is a visual artist and educator from Newark, NJ who works fluidly across performance, sculpture, video, and 2d realms. Rooted in a process-driven practice, they are attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective bodies. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Jewish Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Recess Art, and The Shed. Williams’ honors and awards include the Astraea Foundation Global Arts Fund and Stanford Arts Award. Full bio: http://www.kiyanwilliams.com/bio

 

Kathryn Yusoff: Earth Histories, Ghost Geologies

Colonialism inscribed a racialized earth, pressing black and brown subjects into intimacy with the earth, while its historic forms of racial capital continued to levitated whiteness as a material and metaphoric geoforce on the horizon. In this talk, I will address some of the structural afterlives and material intimacies of colonial earth writing through the ghost geologies that inhabit this white geophysics.

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Most recently, she is author of “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None” (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene” (with Nigel Clark) in Theory Culture and Society, “Epochal Aesthetics” in E-flux, and “Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race” (forthcoming).

All Colloquium events are free and open to the public.