Photo of man and woman

Salad Hilowle and Tina M Campt, 2022 Photo: Louise Helmfrid and Dorothy Hong

Tina M. Campt in conversation with Salad Hilowle

Art and research meet

29.9 2022

Malmö

Welcome to join when Tina M. Campt, professor of humanities, and Salad Hilowle, artist, meet in a talk about blackness and contemporary art. The conversation is a joint arrangement between Malmö Konst, Malmö konstmuseum, Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö konsthall and Lund konsthall.

Being personal and curious – with the present in focus – Campt describes a blackness that is not in relation to whiteness. Campt’s image contains a complexity of shades of both joy and sorrow.

In her latest book A Black Gaze, Artists Changing How We See (2021), Tina M. Campt theorizes and discusses blackness through internationally recognized contemporary artists such as Arthur Jafa, Deana Lawson, and Simone Leigh. Campt elevates artists who create images that flow, that revitalize and reevaluate the historical and contemporary archive of black life in radical ways. She is one of the fundamental researchers in Black European Studies and in her previous work has investigated gender, race and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe, focusing on the role that folk photography plays in historical interpretation processes.

In his artistry, Salad Hilowle explores blackness in a Swedish context. In the conversation with Campt, Hilowle seeks answers to questions about blackness that Campt, among other things, describes in the book A Black Gaze. Do Campt’s formulations about blackness only apply to the African-American diaspora? Or can the wording be transferred to similar conversations in Sweden and Europe? The questions and exploration become the framework for the conversation.