Manthia Diawara’s latest essay film, AI: African Intelligence, explores the contact zones between African rituals of possession practiced in traditional fishing villages along Senegal’s Atlantic coast and the emergence of new technologal frontiers known as artificial intelligence. Reflecting on the confluence of tradition and modernity, Diawara asks how we might move from disembodied machines toward a more humane and spiritually grounded engagement with algorithms. Could Africa be the context from which such improbable algorithms emerge?

Program

Manthia Diawara, AI: African Intelligence, 2022, 110 min

Presented by Manthia Diawara together with Jürgen Bock and Sabeth Buchmann

Manthia Diawara was born in Mali, West Africa. He is a distinguished professor of comparative literature and film at New York University and has published widely on film and literature of the Black Diaspora. He is the author of We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World (2003), Black American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (1993), and African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992). His essays on art, cinema, and politics have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Libération, Mediapart, October, and Artforum. Selected films include Sembène: The Making of African Cinema (1994, co-directed with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), Rouch in Reverse (1995), and Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010).

Jürgen Bock is a curator, writer, and producer. He is the director of the Maumaus Independent Study Programme and its affiliated exhibition space, Lumiar Cité, in Lisbon. As a producer, he has collaborated with Manthia Diawara on several films, including Negritude: A Dialogue between Wole Soyinka and Léopold Senghor (2015), A Letter from Yene (2022), AI: African Intelligence (2022), and Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023).

Sabeth Buchmann (Berlin/Vienna) is an art historian and critic, professor of the history of modern and postmodern art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is coeditor of PoLyPen, a series on art criticism and political theory (b_books, Berlin) and a board member of Texte zur Kunst, the European Kunsthalle, and the documenta Institut in Kassel. Selected publications include Kunst als Infrastruktur (2023), Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, and Critique (2023, coedited), Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics (2016, coedited).

On March 13, a workshop with Manthia Diawara and Jürgen Bock will take place at mumok cinema in the context of Sabeth Buchmann’s seminar at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

In cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Lumiar Cité / Maumaus, Lisbon