Are We Who We Are?
AR-Resident Tito Valery in conversation with Harold Offeh @ Guest Projects, London
All posts filed under: Events
Digital Africa
Danielle WaKyengo O’Neill, still from Crowning Glory (2016), video, 5’8″. Open Source and YaPhoto announce Digital Africa, an evening projection of works by 14 African and Diaspora video artists and documentary filmmakers on Thursday 25 May at the Vortex, London. The artists and filmmakers were selected from an open call launched last March as part of the year-long programme of events and international collaborations developed by YaPhoto, Cameroon’s platform for photography and lens-based art practices. The London screening will present videos by: Paolo Azevedo (Angola), Bruna Cafurica (UK/Sweden), Tamara Dawit (Canada), Edem Dotse (Ghana) & SUTRA (UK), Megan-Leigh Heilig (South Africa), Onyeka Igwe (UK), Wilfried Nakeu (Cameroon), Danielle WaKyengo O’Neill (South Africa), Jean Baptiste Nyabyenda (Rwanda), Amine Oulmakki (Morocco) and Breeze Yoko (South Africa). The works selected include short documentaries dealing with cultural heritage, gender, identity, history and activism, as well as videos focusing on aesthetics, visual narratives, sound and music. Onyeka Igwe’s We need new names (2015) is a video essay examining how a diasporic identity can be formed and performed through the inherent contradictions …
The Place Is Here
The Place Is Here The starting-point for this exhibition is a pivotal decade for British culture and politics: the 1980s. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, film and archives, The Place Is Here brings together a wide range of works by more than 30 artists and collectives. The questions they ask – about identity, representation and what culture is for – remain vital today. In 1982, a group of artists and thinkers met in Wolverhampton at the First National Black Art Convention, to discuss the ‘form, future and function of Black Art’. Two years later, the second ‘working convention’ took place here in Nottingham. What constitutes ‘black art’, or the ‘Black Arts Movement’ was, and continues to be, heavily contested. This exhibition traces some of the urgent conversations that were taking place between black artists, writers and thinkers during the 80s. Against a backdrop of civil unrest and divisive national politics, they were exploring their relationship to Britain’s colonial past as well as to art history. Many artists were looking to the Civil Rights movement in America, Black …
Bouchra Khalili
“The very conditions that make the State possible… trace creative lines of escape” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Nomadology: The War Machine, 1986) Lisson Gallery presents the first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom by Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili. Based between Berlin, Oslo and Paris, Khalili’s work explores the broad topics of migration and displacement through the mediums of film, video, installation, photography and prints. Largely inspired by the idea of journeys, both literally and conceptually, Khalili’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery lays bare the socially constructed nature of borders and challenges our fixed ideas of identity and nationhood. Nowhere do the concepts of movement, identity and borders align more poignantly than in Khalili’s multi-channel video installation The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11). Aiming to draw an alternative practice of map-making, the work consists of eight films that focus the audience’s gaze on the tortuous and complex journeys taken by individuals forced to cross borders illegally. These journeys are literally traced onto a large map seen on screen, while the narrators recount the journey factually, …
