AFTERWORDS: entanglement - Okwui Okpokwasili and Noémie Solomon

Tuesday, September 16, 2025 at 4:30pm
Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

Free and open to the public.

The first event in the AFTERWORDS: entanglement series of public programs will feature Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer Okwui Okpokwasili online and writer, teacher, and curator Noémie Solomon, Director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, in-person.

“Entanglement” is a keyword for studying how human existence is bound up with the more-than-human world, and a call to imagine the web of relations that bind us to each other and the world across space and time. To recognize one’s entanglement complicates one’s sense of agency; to embrace one’s entanglement is to resist the notion of critical distance or objectivity. How do artists and curators navigate their own entanglements? How have they developed practices out of entanglement’s creative possibilities, and in the process transformed traditional ideas of authorship and agency? What work can art do to attune audiences to both the painful and pleasurable ways we are all entangled with each other and the worlds that exist around, before, and after us?

AFTERWORDS: entanglement is a series of public programs sponsored by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP). Guest speakers include artists and curators reflecting on their own practice, process, or method while also attending to a shared keyword. All events are hybrid, featuring speakers both in-person and online.

Curated by CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy '06 and ICPP Director Noémie Solomon.

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. 

Noémie Solomon works in the field of dance and performance as a writer, teacher, and curator. She edited the collections DANSE (an anthology and a catalogue published by Presses du réel, 2014 and 2015) that translate and present key texts on the somatic and linguistic trades between French and North American choreographic cultures. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies and is Director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance.

About ICPP
The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance fosters the collective study of art and its histories with a focus on developing new critical methods for curating time-based art. Rather than narrowing in on a single authoritative definition of performance curation, ICPP’s aim has been to create a pluralistic conversation specifically around contemporary performance, providing fundamental tools with which artists and curators can develop their own approaches to the work. ICPP was created in 2011 by Sam Miller ’75, P’09 and Pamela Tatge ’84, MALS ’10, P’16 at Wesleyan University.