Black Visual Grammar

About

Founded in 2024 by artist Isaiah Lopaz, Black Visual Grammar is a mobile cultural program which utilizes collage making and exhibition practices to engage Black perspectives in an array of themes and subjects. Each edition revolves around a point of inquiry and begins with a two day collage making workshop. During the workshop contributors have access to a vast image archive and other relevant collage materials. Works are documented and later featured in public exhibitions that might include: installations, moving images, sculpture, digital media, site specific works, and printed matter. Black Visual Grammar has been featured in programs curated by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Theater Rotterdam, Theater Dortmund, The Racial Imaginary Institute, the daad galerie, Cité Radieuse Le Corbusier in Marseille, The European Literature Festival Köln Kalk, Afrika Film Festival Köln, Bahnhof Langendreer, heimaten Festival für die plurale Demokratie, and Endstation Kino.

Workshops Select a frame

Black Visual Grammar

How a collaboration unfoldsAn edition in four steps

Collaborate01open call
Collaborate02collage workshops
Collaborate03documentation
Collaborate04exhibition

For inquiries please contact Isaiah Lopaz at:

blackvisualgrammar@gmail.com

heima(R)ten II: Afro-Diasporic Frequencies

Black Visual Grammar Editions IX and X
Bahnhof Langendreer, Bochum · September 2026

Mixed media installation: digital projection, kinetic sculpture, tabletop assemblage, sound

Where do intersections of locality, culture, time, subjectivity, and identity overlap in Afro-Diasporic experiences? This leading question was addressed in two collage making workshops in Köln and Bochum as part of Black Visual Grammar editions IX & X, heima(R)ten II: Afro-Diasporic Frequencies I, and heima(R)ten II: Afro-Diasporic Frequencies II. These crossroads of experience and identity were manifested in a multimedia installation that included digital projections, kinetic sculpture, assemblage, and sound.

Permeating the cold, darkened concert hall at Bahnhof Langendreer, where the installation extends across the hall’s floor onto the elevated stage, is a collage of sounds. A continuous desert wind blares throughout the room, punctuated intermittently by an echoing drum, an electronic chime, and the voice of a woman humming a single note. A kinetic sculpture installed in front of the stage also produces sound. Its plastic surface reaches the concert hall’s floor and makes wave like sounds as the gentle current of a fan moves this material to and fro. The undulating plastic recalls the interior of a womb, sails blowing in a breeze, and a chest rising and falling with every breath. A projector placed behind the sculpture beams diasporic imaginings across its surface. If the kinetic sculpture is a portal where dimensions of diaspora converge, then the works on stage are simultaneously the portal’s interior and the way in, out, and elsewhere. A wide, hanging screen shows horizontal images that transition in time with images projected on the kinetic sculpture. At the center of a tabletop assemblage are De Nyew Testament (a Gullah translation of the New Testament), Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women by LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, and Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash. Above and below these books are paper collages that imagine African and Afro-Diasporic deities that have been brought together through colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

BlackVisualGrammar

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