BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] conference Absent/ed Presence is hosted by Agnes Etherington Art Centre and led by Wedge Curatorial Projects. The conference invites artists, researchers, and scholars to explore Blackness as absent/ed presence in art, art history, performance, archives, museums, cultural production and technology. Presenters consider Blackness as unfixed, ungeographic, invisible and hypervisible, opaque, local and global, while asking: What is the role of abstraction in representation? What are the opportunities and limits in logics of representation? How can we, as thinkers and artists, realize new ways of seeing and what can be found therein? What is the current state of Black creative labour? What are methods for attending to that which the archive absents? What can be learned from all that evades archival capture? How might we imagine Blackness into and out of art’s past, present, and future?

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FATOUMATA TOUNKARA

Fatoumata Tounkara is the Program Coordinator at Union Gallery and a fifth-year international student at Queen's University, currently pursuing her BA in Politics with a minor in Philosophy. Fatou is passionate about exploring how advocacy and the arts can complement one another. She has previously worked as the Program Assistant at Union Gallery, President of the Queen's Student Diversity Project, and as the Outreach Coordinator for the Queen's Black Academic Society, during which she helped coordinate events such as The Soul of the Black Artist. Fatou is currently working on a new initiative called Queen’s International Student Society.