*USB Digital Book includes a full version of the catalog as well as referential texts in African Studies.

afila.si presents BLACK EXPERIENCE ISN’T A SPECTACLE, a referential catalog offering a compilation of poetry and essays edited by Venessa Appiah and designed by Jesse Katabarwa featuring works by ibiyanε. For its premiere exhibition carrying the same title, afila.si explored the legacy of the voyeuristic gaze in representations of the Black body. It intends to exist as a restorative gesture against the erasure of the Afrocentric perspective in [art] history. The show offers a landscape of counter-visualities : “the attempt to reconfigure [how we look] as a whole.” Combining the spatial elements of a visual art gallery and a reading room, afila.si and Anteism Books invited their visitors to engage with individuals of African descent through the productions of our minds, our nuances and our non-monolithic approaches; rather than mere representation in the visual field. This is expressed through a literary and cinematic library and image sequencing mediated with print by Jesse Katabarwa. These works are to be consumed through embodiment with ibiyanε, a collection of sculptural chairs embedded in Sub-Saharan African reflections of physicality by Tania Doumbe Fines and Élodie Dérond. Carrying titles by : Aimé Césaire, bell hooks, Binyavanga Wainana, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kodwo Eshun, Langston Hughes, Léon-Gontran Damas, Maya Angelou, Robyn Maynard, Ruth Mayer, Stuart Hall, Tanella Boni, V.Y. Mudimbe

Catalog details: Published by Anteism Books Sewn Binding at BookArt Inc. Press Embossed softcover Interior Indigo Printing 220 pages 4” x 8”