Join us for a curatorial talk with Katherine McKittrick on this exhibition, which centres nourbeSe philip’s moving poem “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones“, exploring themes of Black girlhood, Black femininity, and revolutionary aesthetics that challenge colonial narratives and re-code the promises of modernity. The talk will be followed by a conversation moderated by Muna Dahir, with a Q&A to follow.

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Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University. She authored Dear Science and Other Stories (DUP, 2021), and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (UMP, 2006). She also edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (DUP, 2015). Recent projects include the limited-edition boxset, Trick Not Telos (2023) and the limited-edition hand-made book, Twenty Dreams (2024).

Muna Dahir is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, where she also completed her M.A., and holds a B.A. in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto Scarborough. Grounded in Black studies, feminist studies, and anti-colonial thought, her research traces Black feminist modes of archivism, documentation, narration, reading, and inquiry across Black Atlantic cultures. Through relational methodologies and direct community archival collaboration, she examines how Black women cultural producers have strategically intervened in and extended the historical record, revealing the innovative ways Black feminist thought continues to challenge dominant narratives while creating new circuits of knowledge.