As part of the Vox-ARTIS program, RAW Material Company invites you to the presentation of Dana Liljegren, a doctoral researcher currently in residence at RAW Material, and whose work centers on recycling. She will share with us the research she has conducted on Senegalese artists who work in this field, on Friday February 8th, 2019 at 6pm @RAW Material Company, Zone B, rue sans soleil Villa 2A.
Dana Liljegren’s research project follows the trajectory of artistic récupération in post-independence Senegal. An English-language critical history of and interdisciplinary approach to the use of reclaimed materials in Senegalese art, her dissertation presents it as a strategy whose implications have shifted at key moments since its emergence. In providing an account of this pervasive practice that draws on art historical methods as well as the emerging fields of “garbology” and discard studies, her analysis of récupération aspires to offer a model for interpreting similar contemporary artistic practices in Africa and around the world, and argues that it comes to signify not just a negotiation of Senegalese and French artistic practices, but a broader engagement with politics of trash and material circulation on a global scale.
About Dana Liljegren
Dana Liljegren is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her specializations and topics of interest include West African art, global contemporary art, postcolonial theory, environmentalism, and film studies. She holds degrees in art history from Brown University, Columbia University, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. After beginning graduate studies in Modern Art and focusing on Conceptual art, film, and photography, her current research concentrates on francophone Africa and pays special attention to materiality and the circulation of objects under conditions of postcolonialism. She is currently Co-Editor of Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, a peer-reviewed publication of graduate student writing and creative projects.