Lecturer in the Art History of Africa
- Name:
- Dr Polly Savage
- Email address:
- ps52@soas.ac.uk
Biography
Polly Savage teaches modules on art theory, curating, and the visual arts in Africa and the African diaspora. After graduating in the History of Art and Archaeology programme at SOAS in 2001, she worked for five years as Assistant Curator at the October Gallery, before completing an MA at Goldsmiths and a PhD in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. She has held teaching posts at Leeds, Goldsmiths and Birkbeck, as well as SOAS. Her most recent research focuses on Cold War relations and decolonisation in Lusophone Africa.
Affiliations
Royal College of Art, October Gallery
My research projects have shared a concern to critically analyse the relations between art and political power in Africa. Most recently, my work has explored the visual subjectivities of decolonisation, transnationalism and socialism in Africa, with particular focus on Lusophone Africa. My forthcoming book Um So Povo: Art, Solidarity and the Mozambican Revolution comprises the first in-depth study of Africa’s Cold War visual art networks. Analysing the aesthetic geographies of solidarity with Mozambique’s liberation struggle, it focuses on the mobilisation of images in the context of conflict and revolution, and considers how Mozambican artists responded to the pedagogies and curatorial appropriations of the socialist world. My first book, Making Art in Africa 1960-2010 (Lund Humphries, 2014) compiled first-hand accounts from artists and curators in 13 countries across Africa, offering a broad overview of contemporary practice on the continent.
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Available for
Regional Expertise
Country Expertise
- Angola
- Brazil
- Haiti
- Madagascar
- Mozambique
- South Africa
Languages
Polly, Savage (2008) Nnenna Okore : Ulukububa Infinite Flow. London: October Gallery.
Savage, Polly and Hawes, Chili (2006) El Anatsui 2006. London: David Krut.
Savage, Polly (2010) 'The Germ of the Future? Ghetto Biennale, Port au Prince, Haiti'. Third Text, (24) 4, pp 491-495.
Savage, Polly (2005) 'El Anatsui: Texts, Contexts, Textiles and Gin'. Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, (5) 1, pp 173-175.
Polly, Savage, (ed.), (2014) Making Art in Africa 1960-2010. London: Lund Humphries.
Savage, Polly (2019) 'Avenida Mao Tse Tung (or how artists navigated the Mozambican Revolution)'. In: Galimberti, Jacopo and Haro García, Noemi de and Scott, Victoria H. F., (eds.), Art, global Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp 249-268.
Savage, Polly (2016) 'Reading Between the Lines: African Students in the USSR'. In: Nash, Mark, (ed.), Red Africa: Affective Communities and the Cold War. London: Black Dog Publishing, pp 35-43.
Savage, Polly (2016) 'Revolution Embodied: Omar Victor Diop’s ‘Liberty / Diaspora''. Source: Thinking Through Photography 96.
This list was last generated on Friday, 25th September 2020, 08:40 Europe/London.