Venue: Stage 6, KHiO. The Norwegian Critics' Association and The Academy of Fine Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts are pleased to present a lecture by writer and curator Legacy Russell. Taking her latest book Black Meme (Verso, 2024) as its point of departure, this lecture explores the commodification of Black identity from the early 1900s to the present, across diverse modes of expression – including early cinema, contemporary art, memes, and viral videos. Russell’s sophisticated analysis of historical and contemporary visual culture argues that Black people have continually been denied ownership of their own image, while raising questions about viral online culture and its relationship to subjectivity, personhood, and the ever-complicated fault lines of race, class, and gender.