Afropresentism, Ancestry, and Incantation
Workshop with Neema Githere

Sunday, October 29, 2023, 1–3pm

About the workshop

This workshop will take place online. 

Date: Sunday, October 29, 2023
Time: 1–3pm EST
Cost: $0–$75 (This workshop is free and/or sliding scale. No one is turned away for lack of funds)

Register here.

Wendy’s Subway is a host venue for two workshops organized as a part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone.

This workshop brings Neema Githere together in conversation with her grandfather, Gilbert Githere, for a live guerrilla theory session exploring ancestry as incantation within the framework of Afropresentism. Coined by Githere in 2017, Afropresentism is diasporic embodiment in the age of Big Data. The elder Githere began his explorations into digital culture through coding websites in the 1990s, and boasts a robust interdisciplinary practice as an artist, musician, and lifelong student of philosophy. Together the pair will theorize on Black diasporic engagements with new and ancient media as a blueprint for interrogating the relationship between ancestral and artificial intelligences from an intergenerational lens.

About the facilitator

Neema Githere (b. Nairobi, Kenya) is a writer, artist, and grassroots theorist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Having dreamt themselves into the world via the internet from an early age, Githere’s work prototypes relationality-as-art through experiments that span community organizing, social design, travel, and image-making. Githere is a 2023-24 Practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, where they are working on a project entitled “Data Healing: A Call for Repair.”

About the organizer

The Immigrant Artist Biennial presents immigrant artists through various formats, facilitating a platform of support for projects by often overlooked and silenced voices. Founded in 2019 by its artistic director Ukrainian-born, NYC-based artist Katya Grokhovsky TIAB is fiscally sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts and funded through its host partners, grants, sponsorships, donations, and its Patron Circle.