The project revisits the concept »parallel exposure«, theorized by South African artist Selby Mvusi (1929–1967) in 1962 at the International Congress of African Culture in Salisbury (Harare). Before an audience that included art world luminaries Alfred Barr Jr. and Tristan Tzara, Mvusi discounted racialized obsessions with »African personality« and the continent’s art’s ostensibly unmediated and unreflected creativity as preindustrial purity. Mvusi’s notion of parallel exposure in postcolonial diasporic space challenged the by-now canonized idea of an »expanded mind« of the sixties that promised holistic liberation through sensorial-aesthetic transgression. Topics ranging from Op Art and the LSD-experiments by Timothy Leary to Marshall McLuhan’s media theory were relevant to Mvusi for inquiring into how the epistemology underlying such counter-cultural opticality and consciousness accounted for the colonial-racial gaze informing modern western visuality and design.

Daniel Patrick Horn is a lecturer in art history at Freie Universität Berlin. He was Principal Investigator of the multiyear project Demodernisms. Art and Coloniality between France and West Africa 1945–1966 at FU Berlin funded by the German Research Foundation, which he completed in 2025. Following his studies in London and Los Angeles, he received his PhD in art theory from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He has received stipends from the DAAD-Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and was a Fellow at the Max-Weber Stiftung-DFK Paris and Institute of Art History Florence-Max-Planck Institute in Berlin. As a critic he regularly contributes to journals including Nka-Journal of Contemporary African Art, Artforum, 21:Inquiries, e-Flux and Texte zur Kunst, as well as to museum catalogues, most recently Paris Noir. Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950–2000, Centre Pompidou 2025. His book Disalienations: Art in and out of Africa at Midcentury is forthcoming from Routledge.