Through the Speaker Series, CCS Bard brings distinguished artists, scholars, and curators to campus to present on their work. Speaker Series talks are held within Classroom 102 at CCS Bard. All talks are free and open to the public.
Nana Adusei-Poku, Ph.D. is an independent scholar, writer and curator as well as Guest Lecturer in Media Arts and Master Fine Arts at the University of the Arts, Zurich. She was Research Professor for Cultural Diversity from 2013-2014 and for Visual Cultures 2015-2017 at the Hogeschool Rotterdam with affiliation to the Piet Zwart Institute and the Willem de Kooning Academy. Adusei-Poku received her Ph.D. from Humboldt University in Berlin for her thesis on post-black art as part of the Graduate program called “Gender as a Category of Knowledge,” following degrees in African Studies and Gender Studies at Humboldt University, and in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Ghana, Legon; the London School of Economics; and Columbia University, New York.
Adusei-Poku is immersed in the void, the abyss, and sunken places and how those articulate themselves in texts, bodies, images, and relations. The question “What are the conditions of our existence?,” which Stuart Hall asked, remain core to her journey and inspire her to embody and develop a decolonized pedagogical approach and to explore the performativity of nothingness and life “in the hold.” Since 2015 she is co-founder of N+.
Adusei-Poku has published several articles, including Post-Post-Black? in Nka-Journal for Contemporary African Art and Catch Me If You Can!, which is a critical reflection on the state of diversity and decolonization in the arts and art education. In her most recent publication On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear, she questions the notion of nothingness, universality, and whiteness common in the contemporary art world.