Place-related artistic practices

Susan Blight will focus in her talk on her collective practice within the Ogimaa Mikana Project. The Ogimaa Mikana Project is an effort to restore Anishinaabemowin place-names to the streets, avenues, roads, paths, and trails of Gichi Kiiwenging (Toronto) - transforming a landscape that often obscures or makes invisible the presence of Indigenous peoples.

Much of the discourse around Ogimaa Mikana has focused on the ways in which the visual/textual properties of the work challenges normative settler colonial notions of space. Existing alongside the centering of Anishinaabe language in the work, and less talked about, is the covert movement of the artists through urban spaces as production and which the work itself reflects. This presentation considers the physical movement within the body of work produced by Ogimaa Mikana and its relationship to Anishinaabeg sovereignty, knowledge production, and a refusal of the demand for consumable Indigenous images.

Ndidi J. Iroh will present the work of Black collectives in Vienna who researched and archived pieces of his*story of Black people in Vienna, starting in the 18th century. When we examine the notion of decolonisation we must view what knowledge is produced, what stories are told and who has access to them. This is inevitably connected to the physical, psychological and emotional violence of colonisation and enslavement. This knowledge is imprinted in our physical bodies and physical spaces. The work of PAMOJA - the Movement of the young African Diaspora in Austria and the Research Group was to uncover Black her*/their*/his* stories in Vienna by the art of un-telling/'remapping' colonial stories and narratives thereby focusing on a self-definition which goes hand in hand with representation and visibility of space and place. With this presentation I would like to remind of such research that has been done in the past and showcase the deep connection to my current artistic work which continues this work and tells more stories of Black hidden his*stories in Austria, specifically in Vienna.

Ndidi J. Iroh based in Vienna and currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. Her artistic focus lies on analog film and photography and other visualisations of Black queer*ness and feminism, highlighting topics such as home, safety and utopia.

Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist working with public art, site-specific intervention, photography, film and social practice. Her solo and collaborative work engages questions of personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space. Susan is co-founder of Ogimaa Mikana, an artist collective working to reclaim and rename the roads and landmarks of Anishinaabeg territory with Anishinaabemowin and is a member of the Indigenous Routes artist collective which works to provide free new media training for Indigenous youth. She has taught at the University of Windsor and her writing has been published in Shameless Magazine , the Globe & Mail, on the Decolonization: Indigeneity, Society, and Education blog, and in the anthology In This Together: Blackness, Indigeneity and Hip-hop . She is the recipient of a 2014 IDERD award for her anti-racism work at the University of Toronto. Susan received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from the University of Manitoba, a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Windsor in Integrated Media, and is currently working on her PhD in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (Universtity of Toronto).

Eine Kooperation des Referats Genderforschung mit der Vortragsreihe zu antirassistischen, BPoC und migrantischen Perspektiven im Feld der Kunst und Bildung.