Curator, Art Consultant, Founder of Culture Art Society (CAS)
Awa Konaté is a Danish–Ivorian independent curator, art consultant, and founder of Culture Art Society (CAS), a research-led curatorial platform focused on African and Afro-diasporic visual culture through exhibitions, publications, and public programmes.
With a decade of international experience, Konaté has developed a curatorial practice distinguished by its interdisciplinarity and commitment to centring transnational art discourses from the perspective of modern and contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. She has worked on projects across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East with both institutional and private stakeholders on acquisitions, commissions, collection strategies, public programmes, and large-scale exhibitions.
Her work centres on archival research, Black feminist pedagogies, and memory work, with a particular focus on lens-based practices, notably photography, cinema, and the moving image. She has curated and consulted on several international exhibitions and public programmes for institutions including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Serpentine Galleries, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Raven Row, and the Barbican, among others.
In addition to her curatorial practice, Konaté has guest lectured at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and served as a juror for the BlackStar Film Festival, the 14th edition of Rencontres de Bamako (2024), ArtHub Copenhagen’s Residency Programme, and more.
Her writing has been published in Third Text, Foam Magazine, and Phaidon, as well as in publications by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Zeitz MOCAA, the Brooklyn Museum, and Louvre Abu Dhabi, amongst others. Through both her institutional roles and independent work through CAS, Konaté advances knowledge exchange and cultivates global networks of artistic, institutional, and curatorial exchange, particularly from the perspective of the Global South.
Upcoming
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Forthcoming
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Alba'hian Book Launch and conversation with Joana Choumali
20 November 4:00 - 4:45 pm
Abu Dhabi Art 2025, HSBC Collection Lounge, Manarat Al Saadiyat
As part of Abu Dhabi Art’s 2025 programme, I will be in conversation with acclaimed Ivorian artist Joana Choumali to mark the launch of Alba’hian, her new book created in collaboration with Galerie Farah Fakri (Abidjan), featuring thoughtful contributions from curators Nadine T. Hounkpatin, Maria Pia Bernardoni, and Professor Yacouba Konaté. Our discussion will explore the conceptual foundations of Choumali’s practice through the interconnected themes of repair, connection, and memory. We will consider how photography and experimental image-making hold emotional, historical, and communal narratives across the African continent and its diasporas, and how these artistic gestures can serve as sites of care, mediation, and reclamation.
The conversation will also delve into the layered processes behind Alba’hian, from its materiality and textile-driven compositional logic to its meditative sensibilities, and reflect on how Choumali’s work expands the possibilities of image-making as gestural storytelling, stitching together the personal and the collective.
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Archiving the Present, Repairing the Past: When a Gallery Becomes a Micro-Institution
18 October 12:30 - 1:30 PM
1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Somerset House screening room
As part of 1-54’s London Talks Programme, this conversation brings together Awa Konaté, founder of Culture Art Society (CAS), and Océane Harvati, founder of OH Gallery (Dakar), to examine how galleries and curatorial platforms today function as micro-institutions. Engaged in constructing critical discourses of art-historical redress, these entities are dedicated to repairing and rewriting art histories through rigorous research, archival investigation, and curatorial strategies. The discussion will explore the methodologies, conceptual re-routings, and modes of knowledge production forged between artistic modernity and contemporary practice, and how micro-institutional infrastructures such as OH Gallery and CAS work to reconcile fragmented narratives for present and future audiences.
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In Conversation with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
19 September 10:35 - 11:35AM
Open Architecture Festival, Arkitektskolen Aarhus
At this year’s Open Architecture Festival—its fifth edition under the theme In the Eyes of the Ordinary—Awa Konaté joins curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung for a conversation on curating, quotidian happenstance, and the politics of the everyday.
The conversation will explore how the ordinary becomes a vital site of meaning, aesthetics, and politics. Framed through spatial planning, architecture, and rhythmanalysis, it will consider how the rhythms of daily life, its pauses, repetitions, and improvisations, inform curatorial and architectural practices as a shared nexus, amplifying the poetics and politics of the everyday as well as informal knowledge systems.