2024 residencies and programme

RAW Material Company is delighted to announce its 2024 program, including artist residencies, public programs, international collaboration, a symposium, and The OFF @RAW during Dak’art 2024. 

Kër Issa—RAW Residency
Over the course of the year, we are pleased to welcome two international residency programs. The first with social worker Ahmed Faour and artist Yasmine Eid Sabbagh (Palestinian). The next with artist Zohra Opoku (German/Ghanaian). For our production based residency we will host the performer and actress Nathalie Vairac (France and Guadeloupe) leading to an exhibition during the 13th edition of Partcours.

Fridays @RAW—RAW public programs
Citéologies is a program of reflection and research on politics of architecture and urbanism in Africa with architect Carole Diop. 

The Argument, with the socio-politologist Hamidou Anne, revives the argumentative and contradictory debate around prevalent issues in our daily lives. 

Vox-ARTIS, with art critic Massamba Mbaye, is a unique moment for artists to share their work, to present and open a window onto their practice for the public. 

RAW Ciné-club, with cultural journalist Aboubacar Demba Cissokho, offers a space to watch and discuss Senegalese films and their filmmakers. 

Pencco consists of a day of gathering to weave links around shared values of collective importance in our context. 

The OFF @RAW—RAW exhibition for Dak’art 2024—For the 15th edition of Dak’art, Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African art, The Off @RAW will present works by artist, Zohra Opoku.​

Zohra Opoku (German/Ghanaian; based in Accra)  examines the politics of personal identity formation through historical, cultural, and socio-economic influences, particularly in the context of contemporary Ghana. Opoku’s explorations have been mostly through the lens of her camera; Her photography is expressed through screen-printing and alternative photo processing on varieties of natural fabrics. She repeatedly integrates family heirlooms and her own self-image into her visual observations of Ghana’s cultural memory. Her practice centers around textiles and traditional Ghanaian dress codes, which have been an inherent part of the country’s identity and industry throughout West Africa’s complex history.

Zohra Opoku is represented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery Chicago / Paris.

Condition Report—RAW Symposium 
Untitled “A Sense of Place” the fifth edition of Condition Report will occur December 12–15 in Dakar, Senegal. It is convened in collaboration with philosopher, economist, writer and musician Felwine Sarr and will radically rethink the places we inhabit and the social as a space extended to the living on a bigger scale. How have actors, active in our local contexts and from across the creative disciplines, responded to and shaped their—our—environment? How do they create sites of possibility? Evoking questions as a way of framing our commitment to what Felwine Sarr describes as “epistemologies of the sensitive” 

Publications
The Specter of Ancestors Becoming book is the fruit of five years of work for RAW Material Company and artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, but some nearly eight decades of life for the individuals who together form the Senegalese-Vietnamese community. This collaboration culminated in the process of creation of the filmic artwork The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), as well as its final form, which is discussed in great depth in this book. The stories of the Senegalese-Vietnamese community that the piece invites us into will never be complete, and we conceive of this book as a further vessel to carry their fragments forward in the hope that the curiosity, empathy and solidarity of you the reader will give voice to the words printed here.

Condition Report 4: Stepping out of line; Art collectives and translocal parallelism, curated by RAW Material Company as part of the Dhaka Art Summit 2020, existed as a forum for addressing practices and forms of production that take the cooperating, non-hierarchical group as a guiding principle. This publication invites the participants of the forum, as well as other thinking partners, to revisit the themes underpinning Stepping out of line; the aesthetics of collective practice, writing collective history, collective economies and the death of the collective. Their unique but interwoven perspectives that stretch the globe are given breadth here, and the strong historical axis at the center of the book helps to draw a line across geographical localities that are now so exposed in their interdependence. 

RAW International 
Rumination upon what feeds our own earnest dreams—La Casa Encendida
In 2024, La Casa Encendida welcomes RAW Material Company to take over one of their space ROOM A in three different times. To start, there is a reading room entitled May our song be worthy of those who listen curated by UntitledDuo on the RAWAcademie practice. The second will take a form of a film and a solo exhibition where resident, curator and artist Renée Akitelek Mboya presents a commissioned-based work mirroring her entire artistic practice entitled An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea, with the aim of developing a methodology from the Spanish context, in connection with the Afro-diasporic community. The third iteration (titled to be defined), is a group show curated by Amina Lawal Agoro on the question of Afro-diasporic identities and communities, with the aim of demonstrating the mechanisms of cooperation that have been put in place between different women artists.

Translation as Hospitality—Kaunas National Theater
Commissioned and presented by National Kaunas Drama Theatre and RAW Material Company, Translation as Hospitality is an artistic journey undertake by The School of Mutants—Hamedine Kane, Stéphane Verlet Bottéro and Valérie Osouf—as part of Creative Europe project DECONFINING. It looks at senegalese filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene training in East Europe back in the late fifties highlighting the links between his trajectory and that of filmmaker Jonas Mekas. 

RAW Partners
RAW Material Company wishes to acknowledge the valuable support of Arts Collaboratory, Open Society Initiative for West Africa (Osiwa), Mellon Foundation, Foundation for Art Initiative, Little Sun and Porticus, Sharjah Art Foundation.

Sign up for the RAW Material Company Newsletter and follow us on Facebook and Instagram for updates. 

We look forward to evermore learning, growing, questioning and collaborating and wish a very happy and fruitful 2024 to all.