This event is wheelchair accessible.
Language: English
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised; It Will Be Live-Streamed
Koleka Putuma is a multi-award-winning theater practitioner, writer, and poet. She is the author of two books: Collective Amnesia (2017), her debut collection of poems, which has sold over 10,000 copies since its release, and Hullo, Bu-bye, Koko, Come In (2021). Her poems have become part of the curriculum at South African and international universities. Today, she ranks as one of the ten most important African poets.
Putuma’s work combines research, performance, technology, and writing to examine the connections between identities, memories, and practices of documentation.
Koleka Putuma`s performance observes notes on language and mediums used to impede (and limit) freedom of expression and information. The multimedia staging moves through global accounts of censorship, protest, surveillance, and our collective dance with sincere and performed apologies and technology in our daily lives. It will be followed by a talk with the artist.
After the event, you have the opportunity to purchase books.
As a part of BuchBasel.
Author: Koleka Putuma
Host: Senam Okudzeto
Biography
Koleka Putuma is a multi-award-winning theatre practitioner, writer and poet. Her poetry tackles themes such as homophobia, womanhood, race and the dynamics of relationships, religion and politics. Her poetry is sharp and thought provoking, unique in its form, language and structure. Every line, a powerful statement of what she stands for.
Her debut collection of poems, Collective Amnesia, was published in April 2017. It was awarded the 2018 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, it was named 2017 book of the year by the
City Press and one of the best books of 2017 by The Sunday Times and Quartz Africa. Collective Amnesia has been translated in 8 languages.
In April 2021, Manyano Media published her sophomore collection of poems, Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In. In 2022, Putuma was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award - a first time award for Poetry. Koleka is a Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative finalist for theatre, a Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 Honoree, recipient of the Imbewu Trust Scribe Playwriting Award, Mbokodo Rising Light award, CASA playwriting award and the 2019 Distell Playwriting Award for her play No Easter Sunday for Queers.
She is the Founder and Director of Manyano Media, a multidisciplinary creative company that empowers and produces stories and works by black queer women.
Dr. Senam Okudzeto is a British-American artist of U.S and Ghanaian parentage. Her work incorporates art practice, writing and scholarly research in responses to previously overlooked socio-economic and political histories within a discourse on feminism, African modernity and a general analysis of material culture. She was the 2018–2019 Visiting Professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d›Arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) and is the Founder and Director of the NGO Art in Social Structures (AiSS), an experimental platform for education in the Arts. Okudzeto has a PhD in Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College, London University, as well as an MFA (Painting), Royal College of Art London, and BA (Painting) from Slade School of Fine Art, London University and completed the Whitney Museum ISP. She has held a Fellowship at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, The Edith Bloom/Jesse Howard Jr. Rome Prize Fellowship in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome and is the winner of the 2023 Paul Boesch Art Prize.
