École du soir

The Evening School

May 23, 2024 to September 1, 2024

3F Inside-Out Art Museum

Ticket price: ¥ 20

Group visitors (Above 10 visitors) with reservation to visit at the appointed time.

Inside-Out Art Museum is pleased to present École du soir, a project convened by artist Christian Nyampeta. Following its manifestation at Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) at NYU Shanghai, curated by ICA director/curator Michelle Yeonho Hyun, this is the second time that the project is realized in China.

Convened by artist Christian Nyampeta and supported by fellow artists, institutions and networks, École du soir (The Evening School) is a multiform hosting structure for collective feelings, cooperative thinking, and mutual actions. An ongoing project of the artist for over a decade, École du soir is rooted in research and reflections on specific experiences in Africa, creating space for emotions, thoughts and actions in the form of exhibitions, translations, publications, screenings and discussions, exploring the possibilities of building a common life in an era dominated by differences. École du soir serves as a space for collective learning, in which audiences are welcomed to watch, read, reflect and interact with the hosting structure designed by the artist, which is based on the school environment of his childhood in Rwanda.

École du soir is both a physical and a conceptual space, a way of thinking and simultaneously a way of acting. As an evening school, it draws from writer and filmmaker Sembène Ousmane’s idea of cinema as “cours du soir” or “evening classes”. Sembène viewed cinema as a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination. His methodology and investing in its viewing methods drew from different uses of time, visual and textual histories, social struggles and hopes, in mutuality between his own locality and the world at large. What Sembène stressed is not just the educational role that cinema plays in popular knowledge, but more importantly its potential in the production and dissemination of knowledge of African subjectivity.

In École du soir, Nyampeta continues to explore public ways of sharing knowledge through different types of practices. Through the many translation and publication projects he has organised, knowledge about Africa has been translated into different cultures in a relay of ideas. This exhibition will present playlists, publications and drawings gathered from previous École du soir projects organised in other locations around the world.

Part of the École du soir is screening, a cinema screens films that gather unlikely figures, across times and spaces, in fictional encounters to discuss social transformation, cultural property, and who has the right to representation and meaning. The other part is a “scriptorium”, which assembles a working group of artists, activists, and scholars to translate texts by philosopher Souleyman Bachir Diagne, who proposed that “thinking Africa” is to think from language to language. At the same time, École du soir encompasses a series of functional and sculptural structural prototypes that turn the museum space into a hosting structure where many activities are to take place, such as video screenings, listening sessions, workshops, rehearsals, dialogues and contact improvisation.

École du soir poses the question to us here and now: why thinking Africa? The exhibition itself is an answer to this question. Around the thread of “Thinking Africa”, this space will be a constant source for rich collective feelings, shared reflections and mutually supportive actions. These intellectually decolonizing fragments of thought take us right to the heart of the human condition. In this sense, we will reflect together on knowledge as a (planetary) commons. And this is another urgent question that École du soir wishes to address, that is planetary in scope: how do we live together?

We invite you to watch films, participate in workshops and “scriptorium” activities, and to use the space according to your needs, individually or collectively. In this sanctuary of knowledge and ideas, the artist invites participants to reconsider their differences as points of unity/being in common, face the limits of our individual perceptions as revealed by these archives of knowledge, and further explore the paths of thought that connect us to one another. École du soir weaves together an invaluable moment of cultural exchange: to connect life worlds, to host meaningful encounters, and to form communities of practice. Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum is continuously committed to supporting and presenting serious, experimental contemporary art and intellectual practices. With thanks to ICA, we are delighted to present École du soir in Beijing, where the translated content can be passed on to all our peers who are willing to learn with African intellectual and artistic legacies. As such, we hope to build bridges of dialogue, create unexpected encounters, and to conjure up the challenges of how to live together and think together from in the past and in the present.

This exhibition shows video clips of Christian Nyampeta’s creations

Artist Takeover

About the Artist

Christian Nyampeta

Christian Nyampeta is an artist living in New York from where he organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta convenes the Nyanza Working Group of ARAC—Another Roadmap Africa Cluster which participated in documenta fifteen, and he is the convener of Boda Boda Lounge 2022–24, a trans-African film and video art festival. His other recent and ongoing activities include contributing to the 14th Shanghai Biennale in collaboration with Wanuri Kahiu, participating in the 58th Carnegie International, Manifesta 14 Prishtina, and the 17th Istanbul Biennial. Nyampeta was awarded the European Union Prize at the 12th Bamako Encounters—African Biennial of Photography in 2019. In New York,Nyampeta convenes the African Film Institute at e-flux in Brooklyn, sits on the Board of Directors at Storefront for Art and Architecture, and is a board member of November Magazine.

About the Curators

Michelle Yeonho Hyun

Michelle Yeonho Hyun makes exhibitions and events with artists and others. She sometimes writes and talks about art, among other things. She is the founding director and curator of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) at NYU Shanghai since 2018. She worked previously as a curator for Shanghai Project (2016), Gwangju Biennale (2014), and the University of California San Diego (2012-14). She has also organized projects for the New Museum (New York, 2012), Creative Time (New York, 2011), and What, How & for Whom (WHW) (Zagreb, 2010).