Concerts – Dance – Performances – Multimedia-Installations – Internet Project – Films – Readings – Discussions – Workshops

Opening: September 16, 2004, 7 p.m. All events 60 Euro, concessions: 50 Euro http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/programm2004/blackatlantic/c_index.html

The Black Diaspora and Black Cultures have had a seminal influence both on the global development of art and on popular trends: in music and dance, in the fine arts and in literature. From 17 September to 15 November the dynamics, networks and migrations of Black Cultures across three continents can be experienced in a series of concerts, dance performances, newly commissioned multimedia installations, readings, discussions, films and workshops. The programme presents art forms that arose from a half-remembered history of transport, slavery and racism, and out of an intense debate on traumas, prohibitions and exclusion. Together they form a patchwork of counter-history and counter-histories that challenge Eurocentrist historiography and engender new concepts of art. They repeatedly confirm the "dissident identities" of Black Culture, as Paul Gilroy, curator of the programme, points out. The present project is named after Gilroy's influential book The Black Atlantic, in which he describes the highly-complex structure of inter-relationships in the African Diaspora that extends across Africa, America and Europe, and the alternatives it poses to Western modernity.