AFTERWORDS: entanglement - Tavia Nyong’o
Tuesday, October 14, 2025 at 4:30pm
Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
“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.
Tavia Nyong’o is the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University and the Curator of Public Programming at the Park Avenue Armory. His award-winning books include The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018) and Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025). His work in critical theory and performance studies explores the intersection of history, imagination, and Black aesthetic life through the lens of performance. Nyong'o is completing groundbreaking research on topics ranging from digital technology's cultural history to racial and sexual dissidence in art and culture.
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.