This episode features the perspective of three critical scholars and artists, including Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Ayana V. Jackson, and Camille Turner. They explore the theme of moving objects and peoples across multiple futures: stories within stories; the sea; floating objects; and shipwrecks as containers of memory, history, and spirits.

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Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, guest
Kenya-born Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novels include Dust (2013) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019), which have been translated into several languages. Her assortment of short stories, essays, reportages, and articles have been featured in numerous publications worldwide. Her texts have been incorporated into art exhibitions in Europe. A self-described “sea-citizen,” Owuor was the Executive Director of the Zanzibar Film Festival/Festival of the Dhow Countries (2003–5). She is also the co-founder of the pre-eminent Pan/Trans-African Nairobi-based Macondo Literary Festival. For a good part of the year, Yvonne lives in and works from any one of the many beautiful places of Africa.

Ayana V. Jackson, guest
Ayana V. Jackson was born in 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey, and lives and works between Brooklyn, NY, and Johannesburg, South Africa. She uses archival impulses to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography.  By using her  lens  to deconstruct nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portraiture, Jackson questions photography’s authenticity and role in perpetuating socially relevant and stratified identities.

Camille Turner, guest
Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice Afronautics, a methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Turner is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD in York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Currently, she is a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Turner is the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her artworks are held in museums and public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada; Art Museum,University of Toronto; Art Gallery of Hamilton; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; Canada Council Art Bank; Royal Bank of Canada; Museum London; The Wedge Collection; and The Rooms.

Zulfikar Hirji, co-host
Zulfikar Hirji is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University. He is interested in how human societies articulate, represent, and perform understandings of self, community, and other and on issues of knowledge production, representation and identity, visual, material and sensory culture, and critical pedagogy. His research focuses on Muslim societies in a range of historical and contemporary contexts, particularly around the Indian Ocean. He has conducted archival research and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in various parts of the world including East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia, Europe, and North America.

Uncontainable Collections: Speculative Futures of Objects is a limited-series podcast featuring three conversations exploring the prospective and yet unknown condition of the might-be through the lens of collections and contemporary art. In this series, scholars, curators, and artists engage with articulations, expressions, and representations of the (im)possible, the (extra)ordinary, and the (un)imaginable—or speculative—futures that diverse individuals, groups, communities, and societies are envisaging, dreaming of, composing, conjuring, striving for, imagining, and bringing into being. This series developed out of conversations between AGYU curators Lillian O’Brien Davis and Clara Halpern and Anthropology Professor Zulfikar Hirji related to the University’s art collection and a course at York University that considers various perspectives: Indigenous Futurisms, African Futurisms, Afro-American Futurisms, Arab/Gulf/Muslim Futurisms, Asian/Sino/Indo/South-Asian/Adivasi Futurisms, MesoAmerican/LatinX Futurisms.

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