Visitors 2012

Manthia Diawara is a writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist and a professor of comparative literature at the New York University (NYU), New York, NY, USA. He is Director of NYU’s Institute of Afro-American Affairs and Director of the Africana Studies Programme, which focuses on an interdisciplinary approach to the study of black culture, literature and politics.

Diawara received his education in France to later travel to the United States for his university studies. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, CA, USA and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. He is the author of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (2003), In Search of Africa (1998), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (1993) and African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema, and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse.

In 1974 Issa Samb founded, together with a group of artists, writers, film-makers, performance artists and musicians, the Laboratoire Agit’Art, whose aim was to transform the nature of artistic practice from a formalist, object-bound sensibility to practices based on experimentation and agitation, process rather than product, ephemerality rather than permanence. With a focus on the contingent character of actions, the Laboratoire was informed by a critique of institutional power. Samb also co-founded the Gallery TENQ – Village des Arts in Dakar. He is the author of numerous plays, poems and essays. A retrospective of his work was held at the National Art Gallery, Dakar in 2010. His work has been included in exhibitions such as dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012), the Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, Dak’Art, Dakar (2008) and ‘Seven Stories of Modern Art in Africa’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (1995).

Peter Watkins is a film-maker and television director. He is the author of several landmark films since the 1950s, such as The War Game (1965), Punishment Park (1970), Edvard Munch (1973), The Freethinker (1992–94) and La Commune (de Paris, 1871) (1999) – films that investigate the current political conjuncture through contemporary or historical settings, and that critically address the limits and possibilities of the documentary form. Central to his work is the critical assessment of the mass media, the media crisis and the monoform, as reflected, for example, in his book Media Crisis (2004).