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Racing the Cultural Interface:
African Diasporic Identities in the Digital Age

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Foreword
by Brenda Cleniuk, Director, Neutral Ground Artist-Run Centre and Ingrid Jenkner, Director, MSVU Art Gallery

This catalogue documents an exhibition focused on some of the most thought-provoking tendencies in recent media art-the practices of black artists who consciously imbue screen space with their diasporic sense of “elsewhere”. The critical effects produced by these works of journeying through time and space, and of rethinking questions of race and nationality, are relevant to the cultural politics of many regions of the world, and especially to those of small cities such as Halifax and Regina.

Racing the Cultural Interface: African Diasporic Identities in the Digital Age includes video, performance, digital art and web texts by Canadian, British and American artists. At MSVU Art Gallery this project represents our second diasporically themed collaboration with curator Sheila Petty; at Neutral Ground it establishes a benchmark in the partnership between Soil Digital Media Suite (launched in 1997) and the New Media Studio Laboratory at the University of Regina.

Table of Contents

—Foreword Brenda Cleniuk & Ingrid Jenkner — Curator’s Acknowledgements Sheila Petty — Racing the Cultural Interface: African Diasporic Identities in the Digital Age Sheila Petty — Catalogue Entries * Sheila Petty * John Akomfrah * Wayne Dunkley * Philip Mallory Jones * Carmin Karasic * Roshini Kempadoo * Camille Turner

Dr. Sheila Petty is a media theorist and Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Regina. Without her generous impulse to share her scholarship through community work-by organizing exhibitions and screenings in art venues-this exhibition and catalogue would not have been possible. Thanks to Sheila Petty’s efforts, several partners and sponsors supported both the exhibition and this catalogue, which is co-published by MSVU Art Gallery and Soil/Neutral Ground. In addition to Dr. Petty, we thank the artists who collaborated closely in the mounting of their works: Wayne Dunkley, Carmin Karasic, Roshini Kempadoo and Camille Turner. We are also grateful to the distributors Electronic Arts Intermix and Smoking Dogs Films for making available videos by Philip Mallory Jones and John Akomfrah.

On behalf of MSVU Art Gallery, which produced this publication, we also acknowledge with appreciation the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Nova Scotia Deparment of Tourism, Culture and Heritage.