Artist, musician, and filmmaker Christian Nyampeta (b. 1981 in Kigali; lives and works in Amsterdam and New York, NY) is concerned with pedagogy and communal ways of producing and sharing knowledge. He uses art and museums to create space for circulating vernacular modalities of gathering and learning from and with one another that were disrupted by the arrival of colonial models of education. Following the work of Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, Nyampeta approaches cinema as an evening academy, or école du soir, which creates a site and framework for collective discourse.
For the 58th Carnegie International, Nyampeta presents a selection of charcoal drawings that function as storyboards for an in-progress film, titled Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. The film and drawings center on a group of friends who have gathered for a day of national commemoration, only to find they cannot remember which event or person the day was meant to commemorate. Nyabingi, the spirit of dust and goddess of the wind, begins to narrate the story each friend believes to be true, moving across space and time to create “a montage of an interior life of the diasporic, in which existing ways of life are converted through forceful spiritual displacement and environmental transformation, understood as a global condition applicable to even those that remain in their native lands.” The scenes in each story were filmed in Congo, Germany, New York, Uganda and Rwanda. In the Charity Randall Galleries Nyampeta additionally presents Stories of an Abundant Future That Was Never Had (2021–ongoing), a series of charcoal tool sculptures made of the same wood he burned to create the charcoal with which the storyboards were drawn. Altogether, Nyampeta builds a larger world of inquiry and imagination, that considers our ability to reconstitute upended histories and modes of collective learning.
