Image: Daara Abdul Karim, 2014. Dnindy, Senegal. Digital C-Print. Courtesy of the Artist.

‍Join us for a conversation about MoAD's current exhibition Baye Fall: Roots in Spirituality, Fashion & Resistance: Photography by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, a photographic series that visually engages the Baye Fall, an enterprising sub-group of Senegal’s notable Sufi Muslim community, the Mourides. These images encourage viewers to contemplate Sufism in a West African context by exploring the community’s reverence for Baye Fall’s founder and leader, Cheikh Amadou Bamba, and his most celebrated disciple, Ibrahima Fall, the namesake of this suborder.

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn will be in conversation with fellow photographer Adama Delphine Fawundu and Art Historian Ivy Mills.

‍This program will include a wine reception. Ticket holders for the Engage Symposium: Picturing Blackness on February 22, 2020 will receive complimentary admission to this event.

‍Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a documentary photographer based in New York City. Her projects have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, OkayAfrica, Vogue, PDN, CBS, Quartz Africa, among other publications. She has curated exhibitions at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Port Authority of NY/NJ, and more.

She has given talks on her photography at Yale University, Harvard University, The International Center of Photography, Tate Modern, New York University, Howard University, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has been published in the Smithsonian-produced anthology, “BLACK: A Celebration of a Culture,” edited by photography historian and professor Dr. Deborah Willis of New York University. She is currently a member of Kamoinge, a pioneering collective of African American photographers founded in 1963.

Barrayn is the co-author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora.

‍Adama Delphine Fawundu is a visual artist, author and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the co-founder of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. Her extensive exhibition record includes the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Steve Kasher Gallery, Pulse Art Fair, the Lagos Photo Festival, The Brighton Photo Biennial (UK), Norton Museum of Art, Villa La Pietra (Italy), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago). Fawundu’s works can also be found in the private and public collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Norton Museum of Art, Corridor Art Gallery, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, and The Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

In recognition of her artistic practice, Fawundu was nominated for and won the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award and named one of OkayAfrica’s ‘100 Women making an impact on Africa and its Diaspora.’ She was also included in the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) ‘Hundred Heroines.’ Fawundu received her MFA from Columbia University.

‍Ivy Mills is a lecturer in the Visual and Literary Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Trained in African Diaspora Studies, she conducted Fulbright-funded research on Senegalese cultural production and taught university courses during a four-year residency in Dakar, Senegal.

She has ongoing research projects on queer animality and social death in Senegalese art, folktales, and cinema; comedic whiteface performance; the visualization of gendered piety in Wolof melodrama and contemporary Senegalese art; ecology and sacred architecture in urban visual culture; and visual activism in Lagos, Nigeria. She co-curated the Bernice L. Brown Gallery exhibition Love across the Global South: Popular Cinema Cultures of India and Senegal, and has moderated conversations with artists and curators for the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and the Berkeley Art Museum.