For this year’s Women’s Caucus virtual luncheon, Fatimah Tuggar will present a visual essay, The Delusional Dance of Academic Conformity, in which she will explore and question hierarchy, power and change in academic spaces. Academia should be a place of learning, freedom of inquiry, and fair and equitable treatment. However, higher education continues to trip over on its ideals. Tuggar’s presentation will be a call to action and change, not through answers but through posing new questions. The power hierarchy is destructive to both learning and teaching with a paradigm that expects unquestioning compliance. Conformity negates rewards of growth and rigour. In the west, the black female is in a false dichotomy. She is constructed as the polar opposite of whiteness and femininity, which is the recognised norm. She is, consciously and unconsciously punished if she is perceived to be an agent of dissent.
Multidisciplinary artist Fatimah Tuggar was born in Nigeria and raised there and in the United Kingdom. She has studied, lived, and worked in the US since the late '80s. Her work uses technology as both medium and subject to serve as metaphors for power dynamics. She combines objects, images, and sounds from diverse cultures, geographies, and histories to comment on how media and technology diversely impact local and global realities.
Tuggar's work has been widely exhibited at international venues in over twenty-five countries on five continents including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, US; Museum Kunst-Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the 24th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Moscow Biennale in Russia; the V Salon CANTV Jovenes, Venezuela, the Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; the Kwangju Biennale, South Korea; Bamako Biennale, Mali; and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa.
Join us on Saturday, November 21 at 1:00 PM EST/UTC-05. The event is free to the public register now!