Transition, Translation, Transcendence
Join us for a conversation with founder and Artistic Director of the QDance Center, artist, researcher, innovator, and social impact engineer Qudus Onikeku, and professor, artist, teacher, social and spiritual activist Manuel Piña, about the intersection of transcendence and technology, to imagine collective African and Afro-Diasporic futures. Moderated by The Polygon's Oluwasayo Olowo-Ake.
Doors at 6pm
Conversation: 6:30-7:30
RSVPs are helpful
Manuel Piña is an artist, pedagog, and social and spiritual activist. His research adopts spirituality and technology as a way of addressing present realities and challenges. His work explores digital imaging technologies and transmedia languages to investigate their role in the creation of our presents, and their generative potentials to enable new sensibilities, ways of life, and community.
Piña is co-founder of the Newtribes School, an online and land-based global network of healers, teachers, and cultural and software activists working towards the preservation and dissemination of ancestral wisdoms and languages from around the globe.
Piña was born in Havana, and graduated as mechanical engineer in Vladimir, Russia, in 1983. He began exhibiting his art in 1992, and has been a professor in UBC’s Faculty of Art History and Visual Arts since 2004.
His work has been exhibited in the Americas and Europe including the Havana Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, Kunsthalle Vienna, Grey Gallery, LACMA, Dorsky Gallery, N.Y., and DAROS Museum.
Qudus Onikeku is the founder and Artistic Director of the QDance Center, a world-renowned artist researcher, innovator, and social impact engineer, who subliminally uses art for non-art outcomes. Over the past decade, he has established himself as a major international artist, working across modes such as performance, installation, curating, and community organizing. His international artistic practice intersects his interest in visceral body movements, kinesthetic memory, and embracing an artistic vision and a futurist practice that both respects and challenges Yoruba artistic traditions. He has created a substantial body of critically acclaimed work that ranges from solos to group works, as well as artist collaborations with visual artists, architects, musicians, writers, multimedia artists, data scientists, and technologists.
After completing higher education in France in 2009, Qudus launched his first company YK projects in Paris, with which he created several solo and group dance pieces to critical acclaim. In 2014, he returned to Lagos with his partner Hajarat, and together they co-founded the QDance Center, an incubator with which they examined and experimented with the possible intersections between art and society at large.
Qudus has been a favourite on major international stages and festivals across 60 countries including Biennale de Lyon, Festival d’Avignon, Centre Pompidou, Philharmonie de Paris in France, TED Global, Venice Biennale, Torino Danza, Roma Europa in Italy, Kalamata Dance Festival Greece, Dance Umbrella UK, Bates Dance Festival USA, and Festival TransAmerique Montréal. His dance works are in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He has been a visiting professor of dance at the University of California, and Davis and Columbia College, Chicago. Qudus is currently the first “Maker in Residence” at The Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship at the University of Florida. His current research, ATUNDA, explores a deep tech solution, an AI-ready dataset for dance recognition and movement analysis, to lay a foundation for cutting-edge interactive systems to synthesize, preserve, protect, and securely share dance and movement data in the age of virality.
Oluwasayo Taiwo Olowo-Ake is a curator, singer, songwriter, and artist, born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. She is the curator of Oruko mi ni: Reinterpreting Ìbejì and Oruko mi: Taiyewo and Kehinde. Her podcast Curatorial-ly Speaking engages contemporary African artists in conversation about their art practice. Oluwasayo currently works at The Polygon Gallery as the Education Programmer.
Banner image: Qudus-Onikeku