Critical Fabulation

with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Dr. Koko, and Ja’Tovia Gary, moderated by Dr. Tiffany E. Barber

Calling upon Saidiya Hartman’s intervention using critical theory, archival research and storytelling, the artists in this panel embrace poetic experiments in light, sound and the moving image to fill in the blanks left in the historical record. In this conversation, we will engage the speculative elements of their practice and consider how their work in cinema and installation has opened up the project of engaging cultural memory and history. Their films, texts and installation works respond to the archives; in both their expansiveness and also in their limits. Their work is a testament to the ways that filmmaking is uniquely suited to the challenge of braiding together disparate and often hierarchical ways of knowing. By bearing witness to the violence of history, and the interior worlds of those pushed to the outskirts of the official record, these artists rouse, uplift and attend to the beauty and poetics in the lives and stories of Black women through time.