Awa Konaté
Culture Art Society
London, United Kingdom · Curating
Awa Konaté is a Danish-Ivorian critic, programmer and curator of contemporary art who is dedicated to preserving moreover celebrating the histories of Africans, both continental and diaspora. She holds a combined BA in Political Science & African Studies from SOAS in London.
She founded Culture Art Society (CAS), an interdisciplinary research platform dedicated to make African cultural activism and arts education accessible to black working-class people. CAS intersects critical studies and art theory to research the cultural economy of African archives and that of its wider diaspora. Run by herself, it is committed to circumventing hierarchies of cultural canons and their access. Awa’s ambition is to develop an art space, where she can support cultural workers, whose work is concerned with preservation, critical thought and making across communities to include those that are often not centred.
As a cultural worker who combines literature, cinema and visual arts to form a critical curatorial practice of memory work, her work pursues the ways in which the archive effects, informs and can reinform liberatory practices beyond disciplinary specificities. Her writing draws on this perspective as well and has been published in Third Text, Paletten art Journal, Widewalls Magazine, The Nordic Africa Institute, and more.