Radical Composition/Radical Collaboration: A Conversation with Cameron Rowland and Saidiya Hartman

Cameron Rowland is an artist whose work focuses on making visible the institutions, systems, and policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economic inequality. Their research-intensive practice centers the display of objects and documents whose provenance and operations expose the legacies of racial capitalism and underscore the forms of exploitation that permeate many aspects of our daily lives. Rowland is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow whose work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne; Établissement d’en face, Brussels; Artists Space, New York and Essex Street, New York. They have participated in group exhibitions at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; 33rd Bienal de São Paulo; Secession, Vienna; Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York and elsewhere.

Saidiya Hartman is University Chair at Columbia University and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. Hartman is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history whose works explore the afterlife of slavery in modern American society and bear witness to lives, traumas, and fleeting moments of beauty that historical archives have omitted or obscured. By addressing gaps and omissions in accounts of trans-Atlantic slavery and its aftermath, Hartman has influenced a generation of scholars and artists by affording readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed. She is the author of three major works, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America, (1997); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007); and most recently, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019).