Seminar and Book Launch black monument: inscriptions within and against the monumental landscape

Join us for the seminar and book launch black monument: inscriptions within and against the monumental landscape, on 5 March 2026! 

The seminar, organized by G/HOSTING with Moving Monuments (UCPH) and Art Hub Copenhagen, explores the tensions between the Eurocentric monument tradition and radical black thought and liberation practices. 

How do radical black thought, black communities, and black liberatory practices challenge colonial monumentality and its promotion of permanence, the nation-state, and liberal subjectivity? What artistic and curatorial strategies arise from this tension to rethink, reshape, and transgress the monument? Can black commemoration practices that refuse colonial frames of public memory reshape our visions of the monumental landscape of the future? 

The seminar will conclude with a celebratory launch of the anthology black monument (AHC and Archive Books) edited by G/HOSTING, accompanied by a live DJ set by Santiago Mostyn. 

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INFO 
 
Seminar and Book Launch 
black monument: inscriptions within and against the monumental landscape 

5 March, 2026 
12.30–18.30 

(Program TBD) 
 
Attendance is free, but registration for the event is necessary. Register through this Billetto link. 

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The seminar features contributions by Olive Vassell (UK), Elizabeth Löwe Hunter (DK/US), Tawanda Appiah (Zim/SE), and Santiago Mostyn (TRI/US/SE). 

ABOUT G/HOSTING 
G/HOSTING is a Copenhagen-based platform, organized by Mai Takawira and Nina Cramer, that uses curatorial, editorial, educational, and dissemination projects to activate critical and reparative approaches to ongoing colonial histories. Through collaborations with artists, writers, and cultural institutions, G/HOSTING facilitates interventions into exhibitions, collections, public spaces, and academic discourses by foregrounding perspectives from the global majority. The anthology black monument (AHC, Archive Books, 2026) is G/HOSTING's first publication. 
 
ABOUT MOVING MONUMENTS 
Moving Monuments is a research project at the University of Copenhagen, organized by Mathias Danbolt and Amalie Skovmøller, that examines the aesthetic lives of monumental sculpture in the context of Danish colonial history. Working from the premise that sculptural monuments are dynamic historical agents whose functions and contexts change across time and space, the project examines the intersections of art, power, and imperial history. 
 

ABOUT BLACK MONUMENT 
black monument explores how artists and communities across Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa disrupt colonial monumentality. Featuring contributions from artists Justin F. Kennedy, Olivier Marboeuf, Jeannette Ehlers, patricia kaersenhout, and Abdul Dube alongside art historian Amelia Groom, black feminist scholars Lena Sawyer and Nana Osei-Kofi, and curator Tawanda Appiah, this anthology centers metamonumental practices—critical, sometimes speculative, and often ephemeral practices that refuse linear chronology and other Eurocentric frameworks. 

Against the backdrop of renewed power struggles over monumental landscapes and ongoing racial injustice, black monument asks: What forms of care for black histories emerge in the absence of sanctioned monuments? 

ABOUT OLIVE VASSELL
Olive Vassell is a journalist and professor who currently heads the Digital Media program at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. Vassell is the co-editor of the anthology Mapping Black Europe: Monuments, Markers, Memories (2023) in which black scholars and activists across Europe highlight monuments, memorials, and urban markers to discuss collective narratives, outline community action, and introduce people and places relevant to Black European history, which continues to be obscured.

ABOUT ELIZABETH LÖWE HUNTER
Elizabeth Löwe Hunter is an independent researcher, writer, and cultural analyst. She examines racialization, belonging, national memory, and representation in Denmark. Hunter has taught antiracist research methods at UC Berkeley and consults organizations in intersectional data analysis and communication, e.g., in the educational and arts sectors. Hunter holds a Phd in Black Studies and Gender Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

ABOUT TAWANDA APPIAH
Tawanda Appiah is a Zimbabwean curator, writer and researcher based in Malmö, Sweden. His research-centered practice often revisits history to make sense of the contemporary milieu. Appiah is the curator at Skånes Konstförening and was formerly the Curator of Education at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Appiah has curated several exhibitions, public programs and interventions including FLIGHT (Malmö Konsthall, 2023).

ABOUT SANTIAGO MOSTYN
Santiago Mostyn is an artist whose practice foregrounds narrative entanglements in pursuit of new understandings of place, both in a cultural and psychic sense. Mostyn has long been interested in the interplay of music, narrative, and the embodied self, with works manifesting as films, exhibitions, and curatorial projects.