Black Art Matters — On Why This Conversation Still Matters

I didn’t invent the platform 'Black Art Matters'.

Black Art Matters, the photography platform and festival created by Marietta Kiptalam (aka SoulMary ) and produced by Michel Pernet within the context of photoSCHWEIZ, was founded in 2020. Long before AfroSwissters entered the room, long before I was asked to co-curate a conversation at the upcoming photoSCHWEIZ FORUM, the question had already been posed publicly in Switzerland:

Is there such a thing as Black art — or is the category itself the problem?

In 2020, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF) reported on Black Art Matters in Zurich at a moment of heightened global attention. Shown at the Maag Halle in the context of photoSCHWEIZ, the platform was careful in how it positioned itself. The organisers emphasised that Black Art Matters had been conceived before the global Black Lives Matter protests — not as a reaction, but as a space for visibility. For recognition. For allowing Black photographers and artists to be seen on their own terms, without being reduced to a single political narrative.

That positioning was not uncontested.

While some welcomed the visibility, others within the Black community voiced discomfort — questioning whether neutrality was possible, whether distance from political urgency felt like safety for some and silence for others. For a few, the refusal to name politics explicitly felt like a missed opportunity; for others, it felt like a necessary boundary in a Swiss cultural context not yet equipped to hold the full weight of the conversation.

That tension never fully resolved — and perhaps it was never meant to.

Because in Switzerland especially, where Black presence is often rendered invisible, provisional, or exceptional, visibility itself is already charged, regardless of how carefully it is framed.

Even without slogans, even without manifestos, the question lingered:

What does it mean to create space — and who decides what that space is allowed to carry?

And this is precisely why I chose to say yes

Not because the tension around Black Art Matters had disappeared — but because it hadn’t. And that tension is needed. Because the questions raised in 2020, including the discomfort and backlash from within the Black community, were never fully resolved. They allow for public discourse and opportunities of growth.

I don’t really believe in spaces that pretend to be neutral. But I do believe in spaces that are honest about their limits — and willing to evolve. Constantly. For me, the invitation to co-curate a conversation within the FORUM of photoSCHWEIZ was not about endorsing any fixed position, but about working inside a living platform.

Platforms like photoSCHWEIZ matter precisely because they are not finished. They are not ideological fortresses. And they don't claim to be. They are public infrastructures — imperfect, visible, and therefore accountable. They can be entered, questioned, stretched.

They can learn. And they are willing to learn.

What mattered to me was not the label Black Art Matters, but the possibility of being part of it and allowing it to be held, differently in 2026 than in 2020.

Not as a defensive container.

Not as a symbolic gesture.

But as a space capable of listening — including to critique.

When Christin Khaukha, as Lead Curator of photoSCHWEIZ, approached me, what I sensed immediately was not her concern for optics, but a genuine willingness to sit with complexity and to let it remain unresolved. Christin's position embodies a moment of evolution for the fair.

Not a rebrand.

Not a symbolic gesture.

But a shift in curatorial posture.

Christin’s Ugandan–Polish roots and her eclectic, transnational worldview are not presented as identity markers for display, but as lived context, shaping how she reads images, senses power, and understands the responsibilities of framing. Moving between cultural references, geographies, and registers comes naturally to her; it is not an add-on, but the ground from which she works. That this responsibility sits with someone under 30 is not incidental. It signals a generational recalibration in leadership — one that is less invested in inherited authority and more attentive to process, relationality, and care. Her curatorial stance reflects an understanding that growth is not measured by visibility alone, but by the capacity to hold tension: between institution and community, history and present, representation and responsibility.

In that sense, Christin’s role marks photoSCHWEIZ’s maturation into a platform increasingly conscious not only of what it shows, but of how it shows, who is invited into the conversation, and under what conditions meaning is allowed to emerge.

And then there is Kourtney Iman King

Another big yes for me to join this FORUM talk was Kourtney Iman King.

In our early conversations, the three of us, across geography and context, confirmed something essential: this was not going to be about producing a panel.

It was about holding a room.

About three Black women, each positioned differently in relation to creativity, curation, and institutions, meeting without needing to flatten our differences.

What drew me in wasn’t an abstract theme, but Kourtney as a person.

Kourtney as a practice. A way of thinking through the body rather than around it.

Three Black women. On a spectrum of Blackness, creativity, curatorial responsibility, and curiosity. Each of us shaped by different contexts — the US' South, Switzerland, Europe and beyond — yet meeting in the same question:

how do we move between institutions and intimacy without losing ourselves?

The long shadow of respectability

Kourtney’s work sits precisely at that fault line.

Raised within Deep Southern religious structures and the AME Church, with maternal roots in Pulaski, Tennessee — the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan — she grew up with respectability politics not as theory, but as daily practice.

Behaviour as armour.

Composure as protection.

Self-monitoring as inheritance.

These codes weren’t imposed out of cruelty. They were survival strategies, passed down by women who knew exactly what the world could do to unguarded Black bodies.

But what protects can also confine.

What ensures safety can quietly delay becoming.

Kourtney doesn’t speak of an “awakening.” She speaks of reclamation.

Of narrative.

Of body.

Of authorship.

Of naming what was internalised in order to loosen its grip.

Her engagement with objectification theory (more here) — the idea that women learn to see themselves through an external gaze — resonates deeply here (learn more). Because that gaze, as she notes, is not only male. It is often white. Normative. Regulatory. And it was internalised by previous generations not out of ignorance, but out of necessity.

Naming that inheritance isn’t rejection. It’s differentiation.

Curating without flattening

This is where Christin’s role becomes truly essential.

Based in Switzerland, with Polish-Ugandan roots and a global mindset, Christin occupies a complex position. One I and many others value immensely . She is both institutional and intuitive.

Both curator and artist.

Both gatekeeper and bridge.

As Lead Curator of photoSCHWEIZ, she increasingly learns and understands how framing works and how institutions translate work, how context can either deepen meaning or flatten it into legibility. As an artist, she resists easy narratives. She is attentive to nuance, to silence, to what sits between images rather than only on their surface.

In a European context where Blackness is often treated as imported, exceptional, or temporary, her presence grounds Black Art Matters in the here and now. Not as a trend. Not as a reaction. But as an ongoing curatorial and cultural responsibility.

Our conversations kept circling the same questions again and again:

What does institutional care actually look like?

When does visibility become extraction? And how do we create space without demanding performance in return?

Why facilitation matters

I enter this conversation not only as the founder of AfroSwissters, but as someone who has spent years setting up spaces where listening actually happens and where people don’t feel exposed for speaking honestly. In this context, facilitation is not just moderation. It’s about how a conversation is set up and held. That means paying attention to pace, tone, and when to step in — and when not to...

The way a room is held affects who speaks, how openly they speak, and whether disagreement feels possible without becoming personal or defensive. I enjoy a good debate. And love fostering it. I value respectful disagreement more than easy agreement. Not because conflict is the aim, but because disagreement often shows that people are engaged and thinking, rather than performing consensus. For me, that’s where a conversation becomes real.

This is the approach I bring into the FORUM conversation on 07 Feb 2026 at 3PM. Not to tidy things up, but to make sure there is enough space for different views to be expressed and taken seriously.

From survival to presence

The women in Kourtney’s photographs do not ask for permission. They carry grace without submission, sensuality without apology. A fullness she describes as divine. Not in a religious sense, but in scale.

In embodied authority.

Visually, the tension remains unresolved: harsh, saturated colours echo the discipline instilled through expectation; softer contours introduce another language altogether. The work doesn’t reconcile these forces. It lets them coexist.

Perhaps that is the quiet insistence at the heart of this conversation.

Our elders survived by doing — by adapting, performing, anticipating danger before it arrived. Survival demanded vigilance, restraint, usefulness.

For many of us today, survival has shifted.

To simply be — without constant self-editing — has become its own form of work.

Not because the world is suddenly safe.

But because the cost of permanent performance has become too high.

Why Black Art Matters still matters

So yes — Black Art Matters existed before AfroSwissters. It continues beyond us.

And that continuity is precisely why this conversation belongs where it is now.

Not as a slogan.

Not as a claim to exceptionality.

But as a reminder that recognition without room to breathe is not recognition at all.

This upcoming FORUM conversation is not about defining Black art.

It is about sitting with what resists definition.

Join us

photoSCHWEIZ × AfroSwissters invite you to the FORUM conversation:

📍 FORUM, photoSCHWEIZ🗓

Saturday, 07 February 2026

🕒 3:00–4:00 PM

🎙 With: Kourtney Iman King & Christin Khaukha

More on the artist: https://kourtneyiman.com/

Come if you are less interested in labels and more interested in what presence costs and what it makes possible.

Come if you are willing to sit, for a moment, with the radical discomfort and freedom of simply being.

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On Kourtney Iman King

Kourtney Iman King is a conceptual artist whose work is rooted in the American South and shaped by Caribbean heritage. She moves between Atlanta, Georgia, and Decatur, Alabama. Places where history is not abstract, but lived, inherited, and carried in the body.

Her academic grounding matters, but it never leads her practice. With a BA in African American Studies from the University of Alabama and an MFA in Fine Arts Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she graduated as the 2025 Excelsus Laureate — King works at the intersection of research and intuition. Theory is present, but it never dominates the image.

At the centre of her work is a sustained inquiry into how Black women learn to perform themselves. Not theatrically, but socially. Through posture, restraint, softness, defiance. Through what is shown, withheld, exaggerated, or muted in order to move safely through the world.

Her thesis project Soulaan Femme examines this tension with clarity and restraint. Drawing on Southern religious codes, respectability politics, and the long afterlife of objectification, King traces how Black femme identity oscillates between natural expression and learned performance. What emerges is not a rejection of femininity, but a reclamation of it — on terms set by the women themselves.

Her portraits resist spectacle. They are direct, intimate, and unhurried. The women she photographs are not posed to be explained or consumed. They occupy space deliberately. There is grace without submission. Sensuality without apology. A presence that does not ask for permission.

Formally, King works with contrast, silhouette, saturated colour, and scale — visual strategies that echo the very dynamics she is questioning: visibility and concealment, discipline and release.

The studio, traditionally a site of exclusion or control, becomes in her work a place of affirmation.

Not neutrality.

Assertion.

While deeply personal, her practice is never insular. It is informed by collective memory — by the women she grew up around, by Southern Black households, by shared strategies of survival that were once protective and are now being gently unlearned.

Alongside her artistic work, King operates fluently within contemporary cultural ecosystems. She has collaborated with clients including Luna Luna, Live Nation, FX Networks, Viiv Healthcare, Broccoli City, and Adolescent Content, and her work has been featured by Thames & Hudson, MUSEE Magazine, PH Museum, and SHOWstudio. Recognition has followed — but it has never overtaken the work.

What makes Kourtney compelling is not her résumé.

It is her restraint.

Her refusal to overstate.

Her ability to sit with contradiction — and allow it to remain visible.

This is why her presence at photoSCHWEIZ, in Switzerland generally and at this year's FORUM matters. Not as a spokesperson.

Not as a symbol.

But as an artist whose work makes clear that, for many Black women, simply being is neither natural nor granted — it is practiced under pressure, against history, and in full awareness of the gaze.

PS: Kourtney I look forward to meeting you soon. Christin, Thank You for having me/'us' at the FORUM