Archives of the Sun

Manthia Diawara is a professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (2003), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992), and In Search of Africa (1998). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Professor Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o on the documentary Sembène: The Making of the African Cinema, and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse.

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher and playwright. He is a professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Philosophy of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and one of the founding members of the Faculty of philosophy of the Université Paris VIII. His major works include Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. His philosophical oeuvre connects continental and analytical philosophical traditions along with his reflections on set theory and contemporary mathematics.

Alicia Knock is a curator at Centre Pompidou, the National Museum of Modern Art. She seeks to develop specific geographical scenes (Africa, Central Europe) at the Centre Pompidou, both in terms of acquisitions and exhibitions (Ernest Mancoba, 2019; China Africa, Crossing the World Color Line, 2020; Global-e Resistance, 2020). She seeks to explore new exhibition formats through prospective projects questioning the museum of tomorrow (Museum On/Off, 2016; Harmony Korine, 2018) and is particularly interested in the visibility of woman artists (La terre la plus contraire, 2017; Soudain mon ombre s'est allongée…, 2018) She was also curator of the Albanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale and co-curator of an exhibition dedicated to Boris Mikhailov at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev (2019).

Valentine Umansky is currently acting as Curator of International Art at Tate Modern. She has previously held positions at the International Center of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, and the festival Rencontres d’Arles. In 2018, she co-curated the LagosPhoto festival and with Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, she co-organized the exhibition Layers (2019-2020). She is the author of Duane Michals, Storyteller: petite histoire du rapport fluctuant entre texte et image (2015) and has published in magazines such as Aperture and FOAM. In 2020, she organized two solo exhibitions of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Saya Woolfalk, and Confinement. Politics of Space and Bodies.

Jana Ndiaye Berankova is a philosopher, writer, publisher and architecture critic. She is a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and a former student of École Normale Supérieure in Paris and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Her research interests include the links between continental philosophy and architectural theory, social movements of 1968, and Central European architecture. She co-edited Alain Badiou: Sometimes, We Are Eternal (2019), Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring (2020) and the issue of Filozofski Vestnik “Thinking the Infinite” (2020). She is the founder of the publishing house Suture Press, and a member of the Prague Axiomatic Circle.

Vincent Jacques is an associate professor of philosophy at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles, program director at Collège International de Philosophie, and researcher at the HAR EA 4414 laboratory, Université de Paris X – Nanterre. He is the author of Deleuze (2014) and Chris Marker, les médias et le XXe siècle. Le revers de l’histoire contemporaine (2018). He is currently conducting a research program on Harun Farocki and his relationship to history and technology, at the MSH Paris Nord.

Discussion participants:
Mamadou Diouf
Étienne Balibar
Alain Badiou
Reza Naderi
Norman Madarasz