TRICKSTERS
We borrow our title for this program from one of the main characteristics of the orisha Èṣù in Yoruba spirituality and Ananse in Akan mythology. Tricksters hold a double edge — playful, mischievous and open to possibilities, they hold promises but also the risks and perils associated with uncertainty and irreverence towards colonial law and norms.
Curated in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.
Apapa Amusement Park
Karimah Ashadu, 2013, Nigeria, 3mn
Apapa Amusement Park, once a fully operational playground in Lagos and a familiar childhood stomping ground of the artist, is now abandoned. The film captures youths playing football – momentarily animating the blank space as the eagerness of the game hints at the former fun-filled atmosphere of the park.
Karimah Ashadu is a British-born Nigerian Artist and Film Director living and working between Hamburg and Lagos. Ashadu’s practice is concerned with labour, patriarchy and notions of independence pertaining to the socio-economic and socio-cultural context of Nigeria and its diaspora.
Liberty
Faren Humes, 2019, United States, 17mn
Two dance teammates’ friendship is tested when Liberty Square, the predominantly black Miami neighborhood in which they live, is forcefully redeveloped.
Faren Humes is a filmmaker from Miami and Sanderson, Florida, who melds narrative and documentary conventions to explore and invoke Black continuation. Her work engages questions of displacement in the Liberty City neighborhood in Miami, Florida.
On Freedom of Movement (wi de muv)
Julianknxx, 2022, Sierra Leone, 10mn
As both a meditation and a listening exercise, On Freedom Of Movement (wi de muv) considers the necessity and inevitability of movement and the ability of the environments we live in to create the space we need, with a focus on cities. Moving between places and across borders is so much more than just crossing them and cities play a key role in this journey of ideas, people and cultures.
Julianknxx’s work merges his poetic practice with films and performance; he engages in a form of existential inquiry that at once seeks to find ways of expressing the ineffable realities of human experiences while examining the structures through which we live. In casting his own practice as a ‘living archive’ or an ‘history from below’, Julianknxx draws on West African traditions of oral history to reframe how we construct both local and global perspectives. He does this through a body of work that challenges fixed ideas of identity and unravels linear Western historical and socio-political narratives, attempting to reconcile how it feels to exist primarily in liminal spaces.
Specialized Technique
Onyeka Igwe, 2018, Nigeria, 7mn
William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit developed a framework for colonial cinema, this included slow edits, no camera tricks and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance with this rule set. In an effort to recuperate black dance from this colonial project, Specialised Technique, attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.
Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher born and based in London, UK, working between cinema, non-fiction video work and installation. She uses dance, voice, archive and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises untieable strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. She is particularly focused on invoking lineages of female ancestors and recovering erased African women’s histories from the colonial archives.
Trading Memories
Olukemi Lijadu, 2022, UK/Nigeria, 3mn
Lijadu investigates found photographs of a Yoruba family in the early 2000s as objects of memory, a family history, and a site of encounter between the filmmaker, the viewer and the images.
Olukemi Lijadu is a visual and sound artist who works with moving images, philosophy and music. Lijadu DJs under the moniker Kem Kem. She uses the power of cinema to take viewers on audio-visual journeys of reconnection across the Atlantic. Lijadu approaches music as a living archive of communal memory and lost connections - critical given the history of the Black diaspora worldwide. With heritage from Nigeria, the Caribbean and Brazil, the impetus of her artistic practice is both personal and political. Her academic training as a philosopher deeply informs her experimental approach to her expansive practice.
A Letter (side B)
Larry Achiampong, 2023, Ghana, 20mn
Achiampong explores the affective impact of history, immigration, and geographical separation on two brothers living between Britain and Ghana. Collapsing time, the film incorporates recent footage filmed by Achiampong in Ghana as well as archival footage from The Museum of African Art: The Veda and Dr Zdravko Pecar Collection in Belgrade, Serbia. Continuing his exploration of the concept of Sanko-time, meaning to go back and retrieve, the work alludes to the importance of the past in the present.
Larry Achiampong's projects employ film, still imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance, objects, sound and game design to explore ideas surrounding class, gender, cross-cultural and digital identity. With works that examine his communal and personal heritage – in particular, the intersection between popular culture and the residues of colonisation, Achiampong crate-digs the vaults of history. These investigations examine constructions of ‘the self’ through the activity of splicing the audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives, offering multiple perspectives that reveal the deeply entrenched inequalities in contemporary society.
