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What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965
Valentine Umansky
Having left France, where she worked for the Rencontres d’Arles festival, Valentine Umansky relocated to the U.S. in 2015, where she is currently acting as the Curator of Lens-Based Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Over the last five years, she published Duane Michals, Storyteller with Filigranes Editions; SPUD. Photographs by Brian Griffin with GOST; All my seven faces. Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum with Radius Books and is currently working towards the publication of Layers, coinciding with the eponymous exhibition, co-curated with Iheanyi Onwuegbucha (CCA, Lagos, Nigeria) at Labanque Museum, France. This year, she curated solo exhibitions of Saya Woolfalk; Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Jens Schwarz, as well as a group exhibition devoted to the notion of confinement at the CAC, Cincinnati. She joined Cincinnati after the completion of the 2018 LagosPhoto Festival, which she curated with Eva Barois De Caevel, Wunika Mukan and Charlotte Langhorst.
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati