Three questions for Awa Konaté

Power Ekroth (PE): Tell us about your platform, Culture Art Society (CAS), that you run. Why did you start it and when, and what has been your main purpose? 

Awa Konaté (AK): I started CAS in 2013, initially as an online archive project on Instagram for visual research, with the aim to create access to African/Diasporic visual culture outside of institutional framework whilst bridging discursive gaps between past and present Black histories. 

I was quite frustrated with the wider curatorial and institutional framings of Black lives that were so often positioned from the point of view of and through violences that disenfranchise and oppress. With CAS I wanted to initiate a framework for co-learning from which I could question how Black artists, past and present, have created other imaginaries in spite of and not only through these conditions. So when I founded CAS, the main purpose was to explore how we remember, How do we forge linkages between different fragments of cultural knowledge, experiment in archiving, and explore different ways of sustaining the archive through CAS?

Today CAS is a curatorial platform built on this digital archive, which is itself a space of knowledge production that holds different fragments of aesthetic, spatial, and intellectual thought as it relates to questioning hegemonic narratives around space, race, and belonging. 

PE: You spent some time at the curatorial residency in Stockholm, Nordiska Konstförbundet (NKF), and even if you are now based in London, you are also based in Copenhagen, and it makes me wonder how you perceive the similarities and differences between the Nordic cities of Stockholm and Copenhagen. 

AK: It’s hard to say! This residency with Site Zones and NKF was my first deep dive into understanding Stockholm in terms of contemporary art, institutionally and independently through artist and curator-led spaces.  But speaking about this visit only, it was interesting to observe the extent to which contemporary art in Stockholm seems institutional compared to Copenhagen. Institutional exhibitions and presence are coveted, as everywhere, but it seemed particular to this city because there appears to be very few independent alternatives. Whereas in Copenhagen, the number of independent spaces, or smaller institutions as I prefer calling them, is growing and it’s great because they are just as important. 

Something else I noticed is how strong  institutional collections in Stockholm are compared to Copenhagen. The strength to me really lay in how multifaceted they were in terms of the range of media, geographical location, and age of artists, and especially that emerging artists were part of the collections. That’s something institutions in Copenhagen could and really should do better. 

PE: Are you happy with your residency, and what were the results? 

AK: Very much so. It was such a pleasure to gain intimate insight into the creative developments of the city and be the recipient of such hospitality.

Working transnationally and connecting geographies, histories, and subjectivities to support constellations of diasporic knowledge has always been of curatorial imperative. And as I’m working increasingly in Copenhagen and across Scandinavia, this residency in Stockholm has facilitated an introduction to local cultural workers who are doing very important work reworking the temporal and spatial considerations of this region. 

Compared to London, cities across the Nordics are very small and this is also reflected in how small art communities are, thus it becomes even more urgent to be connected across our localities and support shared practices here.