On Screen: Global Intimacy

On Screen: Global Intimacy features seven artists from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States whose work attempts to break down assumptions about the transnational reach of globalization as a universalizing phenomenon. The artists’ diverse locations and histories reveal the competing and contradictory claims about globalization as a homogenizing force.

Through the medium of digital video, these artists construct visual narratives that range from the literal to the imaginary,exposing the multiple identities that emerge between tradition and modernity, resilience and restraint, empowerment and subjugation. These works manipulate time, space, sound, and symbol to interrogate the uncertain and often fraught connections between nationhood and citizenship. They gesture towards reconfiguring the mobility of capital, people, and goods in today’s global networks. Seen together, these films reimagine those networks as comprised of spaces that exist outside of and in between the dominant relations of power that have long rendered the local invisible.

On Screen: Global Intimacy is curated by Tumelo Mosaka and organized by Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The exhibition andprogramming are sponsored in part by Frances P. Rohlen Visiting Artists Fund/Collegeof Fine and Applied Arts; Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; Krannert Art MuseumDirector’s Circle; Krannert Art Museum Council; School of Art + Design Visitors Series;and Center for African Studies (with support of the US Department of Education Title VIgrant).