Curating Queer Black Legacies: Ajamu and Sur Rodney (Sur) in conversation

Curating Queer Black Legacies was a public program coordinated for Ajamu's Visual AIDS curatorial residency. In the context of recent controversy over a lack of representation of black artists in the exhibition Art AIDS America, Ajamu and Sur Rodney (Sur) considered the history and stakes of curating art and archives from artists of color, in America and internationally. Taking place at Syracuse University's Lubin House in New York City, this timely conversation highlighted Ajamu's photography and archival curatorial practice alongside the the Palitz Gallery's exhibition of the work of photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

Launched in 2012, Visual AIDS and Residency Unlimited (RU) join efforts to host a one-month residency program for a curator, art historian, or arts writer interested in the intersection of visual art and HIV/AIDS. The curatorial residency encourages the development of exhibitions, programs, and scholarship about HIV/AIDS and contemporary art. The resident curator conducts research in Visual AIDS' archives with access to slides, digital images, publication and other resources. The archives hold over 17,000 digital and slide images by 643 artists living with HIV and the estates of artists who have passed away.

Ajamu is from London and is one of the leading historians concerning Black LGBT history in the UK. He has worked with a cross section of community organizations within the HIV/AIDS sector in the role of Black Gay Men’s Outreach worker, trainer and workshop designer for Gay Men Fighting Aids (GMFA), freelance consultant, photographic tutor and freelance photographer—creating images for safer sex campaigns, flyers and posters in relation to activism and social justice. Ajamu is also the co-founder, along with Topher Campbell (Theatre Director and Film Maker), of the rukus Federation, an organization dedicated to showcasing the best in challenging and provocative works by Black queer artist, activists and cultural producers and the rukus! Black LGBT Archive.

Sur Rodney (Sur) is a writer, artist, archivist and activist. A fixture on the East Village art scene, Sur was co-director, with business partner Gracie Mansion, of the celebrated Gracie Mansion Gallery (1983–88), which helped establish the international reputations of many young and emerging artists. In the late 1980s, Sur shifted his practice to work with artists affected by the growing AIDS crisis, leading to his involvement with Visual AIDS and the Frank Moore Archive Project. He also began to collaborate on curatorial projects with his longtime partner Geoffrey Hendricks, organizing a series of exhibitions related to art and AIDS.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) is a seminal figure in 1980s black British and African contemporary art. His timeless photographs constitute a profoundly personal and political exploration of complex notions of desire, diaspora, and spirituality. In his large-scale portraits, the black male body becomes the focal point of a photographic inquiry to imaginatively interpret the boundaries between spiritual and erotic fantasy, cultural and sexual difference. Ancestral rituals and a provocative, multi-layered symbolism fuse with archetypal motifs from European and African cultures and subcultures – inspired by what Yoruba priests call ‘the technique of ecstasy’.