Oulimata Gueye
Oulimata Gueye is a Senegalese and French critic and curator. Her curatorial approach is based on research which lies at the intersection of digital sciences and technologies, contemporary art, popular cultures, literatures and micro-politics. From 1998 to 2002 she was part of the team that founded Batofar, organising numerous international multidisciplinary art events dedicated to contemporary art and to electronic and urban cultures. She is a member of the artist collective On-Trade-Off. She holds a Master in cultural management delivered by the Paris 8 University, and studied Art and Language the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
From 2003 to 2011, she co-directed the nomad festival Infamous carousel (Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Jeu de Paume, Les Instants Chavirés, the Point Éphémère) dedicated to performance, experimental sound practices and to media arts. Since 2010 she has been studying the impact of digital technologies on popular urban cultures and artistic practices in Africa. Among her areas of investigation she has developed a research project around the links between fiction and digital cultures called Africa sf (2011-2017). Africa sf defends the idea that, marked by intense economic, technological, political, social and aesthetic upheavals, the African continent’s entry into the internet era has been conducive to the development of techno-scientific imagination, and that science fiction is the genre best able to provide an account of this interface and interactions between the present, projections into the future and foundational myths.
Between 2018 and 2019 she was also co-curator of Digital Imaginaries, a vast project of encounters and exhibitions around digital imagination in Africa, conceived in collaboration with a number of institutions: Kër Thiossane, Dakar: Utopies non Alignées – WAM and Fakugesi, Johannesburg: Prémonition and also the at the ZKM, Karlsruhe: Africas in Production. She co-edited Digital Imaginaries, African positions beyond binaries (ZKM-Kerber, 2021); and is the curator of the exhibition UFA, Université des Futurs Africains, at the Lieu Unique (spring of 2021), as part of the Africa 2020 season.
She has a longstanding interest and commitment to the uses of digital technologies in Africa and within its diasporas. Through her projects, Africa SF, Non-Aligned Utopias, Afrocyberfeminisms, Digital Imaginaries, among others, she studied the intersections between fiction, science, and technology that allow for the development of critical analysis and the imagination of alternative histories.
Source: On-Trade-Off
- On-Trade-Off
