Dr Polly Savage

Polly Savage teaches and writes on art theory, curating, and the visual arts in Africa and the African diaspora.

She has worked on a range of curatorial and research projects across Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean over the last two decades, and held a curatorial post at London's October Gallery for 5-years.

She has an MA in Postcolonial Studies from Goldsmiths and a PhD in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, and has taught at several other universties including Leeds, Goldsmiths and Birkbeck. Her most recent research focuses on the visual cultures of decolonisation and the Cold War in Lusophone Africa.

My research projects have shared a concern to critically analyse the relations between art and political power in Africa. Most recently, my work has explored the visual subjectivities of decolonisation, transnationalism and socialism in Africa, with particular focus on Lusophone Africa. My forthcoming book Um So Povo: Art, Solidarity and the Mozambican Revolution comprises the first in-depth study of Africa’s Cold War visual art networks.

Analysing the aesthetic geographies of solidarity with Mozambique’s liberation struggle, it focuses on the mobilisation of images in the context of conflict and revolution, and considers how Mozambican artists responded to the pedagogies and curatorial appropriations of the socialist world. My first book, Making Art in Africa 1960-2010 (Lund Humphries, 2014) compiled first-hand accounts from artists and curators in 13 countries across Africa, offering a broad overview of contemporary practice on the continent.