Artist Talk:
Juan Orrantia

July 24, 2017
12–1 p.m.

Join us for an artist talk with Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow Juan Orrantia! The photographer will discuss Why Would, his project tracing Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the first African independence movement from Portuguese colonialism. Featuring photographs from Guinea-Bissau paired with ethnographic objects and historical images from Portuguese colonies, Orrantia has created a catalogue of traces, of uncertainties, of things imagined. Orrantia will discuss the possibilities of contemporary photography to explore memory, its limits, and its role in the way narratives are constructed but also silenced—particularly in the case of forgotten or absent histories of African colonialism and liberation.

Juan Orrantia was born in Colombia and is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He relies on the ambiguity of photography to explore the veracity of what or how we remember in the construction of narratives and meanings. Orrantia has received the Tierney Fellowship in Photography (2010–11), was a nominee for the Higashikawa Award, and has held residencies at Khoj International Artist Workshops (India). His work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Berlin, Colombia, and South Africa, and group shows including the Encontros da Imagem, Rencontres de Bamako, the New York Photo Festival, Le Cube (Paris), and the Contro-Sguardi Documentary Festival, among others.

Free and open to the public