TALKING BOOKS
Ameena Quansah, Ilaaf Khalfalla and Jeanne-Ange Wagne . Experts for Afro-German literature
Sophia Greiff and Raluca Blidar . C/O Berlin Foundation / Siddhartha Lokanandi and Erin Honeycutt . Hopscotch Reading Room
Café C/O Berlin x Barkin'Kitchen
First come, first serve (exhibitions not included)
With TALKING BOOKS, C/O Berlin has been regularly highlighting the world of photo books since spring 2024. In addition to the diversity of their forms and formats, their use as an artistic medium and their reception in research and criticism, the focus is on local book culture: In the relaxed atmosphere of the C/O Berlin Café, Berlin bookstores present their favorite books; publishers and photographers present their latest projects and experts exchange ideas with the audience about the many facets of the relationship between photography and books.
We are organizing the second edition of TALKING BOOKS on the occasion of the exhibition Tyler Mitchell . Wish This Was Real in collaboration with the Hopscotch Reading Room: an English-language bookstore and artistic event space with a focus on anti-colonial, non-Western, diasporic and queer perspectives. Siddhartha Lokanandi founded Hopscotch in 2018 and has been running the space with Erin Honeycutt ever since.
Our guests Ilaaf Khalfalla, Ameena Quansah und Jeanne-Ange Wagne are invited to present books that offer reflections on contemporary photography from an Afro-German perspective.
In addition, Hopscotch Reading Room is curating a book table at the C/O Berlin Bookshop from Aug 21 – Sep 4.
Come by to browse and be inspired!
Ilaaf Khalfalla is a Sudanese-German artistic researcher and creative based in Berlin. Her interest in fashion photography and publishing led her to casting direction. The endeavor of black creatives to break existing patterns of representation and create a new visual language was groundbreaking. In her theoretical work, she critically examines the history of Western pictorial traditions and is interested in the emancipatory potential of photography in works from the African diaspora.
Ameena Quansah reads in the Berlin subway and focuses on German Black authors due to the underrepresentation of marginalized people in literature, highlights BIPoC authors and reads predominantly African queer feminist literature. In Berlin, she runs a BIPoC book club in which German and English-language books are discussed and scrutinized from a power-critical perspective.
Jeanne-Ange Wagne is an art historian, knowledge mediator and event curator, who engages in artistic research on memory (cultures), colonial provenance research and germany’s colonial history. Until Oct 2023 she worked for the German branch of the transnational research project "The Restitution of Knowledge", at the department of Art History at Technische Universität Berlin where in 2022/ 2023 she co-curated and coordinated the event series KuK-Tuesdays: Dislocation.
