Recommended age limit: 18 years
Doors open: 18:30
Event starts: 19:00
The conversation will be held in English
Meet some of the most important voices in afrofuturism and africanfuturism with the author Nnedi Okorafor and the multidisciplinary artists Sandra Mujinga and Christelle Oyiri for a conversation led by curator and author Bianca A. Manu. The night ends with an exclusive musical performance by CRYSTALLMESS (Oyiri's DJ pseudonym). Expect an epic journey down unexpected paths, where you can hear rap, footwork and even Aphex Twin-style ambient techno mixed with dembow or accelerated zouk rhythms.
Afrofuturism (and the more recent term africanfuturism) challenges societal inequalities through visions of the future. Writers, musicians and artists draw on rich African cultures and histories, combining past, present and the foreseen to broaden our perspectives on how we can change the world.
The conversation is a dialogue with the audience about creativity, ideas, dreams, and storytelling through the lens of Okorafor, Mujinga and Oyiri's artistic practices. How does African speculative fiction translate through various artistic expressions?
Nnedi Okorafor ©Colleen Durkin
Nnedi Okorafor is a pioneer of africanfuturism – speculative fiction that centres Africa. With her novels such as Who Fears Death (currently being turned into a series for HBO), The Book of Phoenix, Akata Witch and Lagoon, along with her Binti trilogy of novellas, she has won all of the most prestigious literary awards for fantasy and science fiction, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards. Additionally, her debut novel Zahrah the Windseeker won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. She has also written africanfuturist graphic novel Laguardia; comics for Marvel, including Black Panther: Long Live the King and Wakanda Forever and the Shuri series. Nnedi holds a PhD (literature) and two MAs (journalism and literature). She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Sandra Mujinga
Sandra Mujinga is a multidisciplinary Norwegian artist and musician based in Berlin and Oslo. Thinking through speculative fiction in Afrofuturist tradition, Sandra Mujinga plays with economies of visibility and disappearance. Her work negotiates questions of self-representation and -preservation, appearance, and opacity, often by reversing traditional identity politics of presence. Her works depart from a purely anthropocentric approach to understanding the transient world we are living in now. For this reason Mujinga looks for inspiration in how animals develop survival strategies and adapt to hostile surroundings.
CRYSTALLMESS 2 ©Marc Asekhame
Christelle Oyiri is a Paris-based artist, and producer/DJ (under the pseudonym CRYSTALLMESS). Combining film, music, performance, and sculpture, her radically interdisciplinary work deals with themes of alienation and alternative temporalities. Faced with the deliberate erasure of narratives outside the dominant canon, Christelle Oyiri looks for information between the lines. Her research is focused on the tonalities, textures, and visual vernacular of the music, art, popular culture, and youth cultures within and outside the African diaspora. v
Bianca A. Manu
Bianca A. Manu is a Ghanaian-British curator, writer, and producer with specialist knowledge of modern and contemporary African art, archives, and photography. Her experience includes consultation, curation, and production for Serpentine Gallery, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Wellcome Collection, Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière and Art Fund. Published journalism includes the Guardian, BBC, Sky News, Red Bull Music, NAATAL and CNN, and prose featured in the international bestseller Lean In (Sheryl Sandberg, Penguin Random House, 2014). Awards & residencies include International Curators Forum, Liverpool (2016); Art Fund, Manchester (2016); Stuart Hall Library Residency, London (2018); Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2021) and Fluxus Art Projects Curatorial Research (2024).
The event is part of a program dedicated to afrofuturism in art, literature and music, a collaboration between MUNCH, the House of Literature in Oslo, Kunsthall Oslo and Blå.
Program at the House of Literature in Oslo
Program at Blå* TBA
*The ticket includes free entrance to Blå before midnight Friday 7th of February. Please note that Blå has 20 years age limit.
