Film Works
8 JuneThursday 8 June
5-7pm
FREE, booking essential
Meet at Gallery Reception
Artists’ films in the Sainsbury Collection
Film Works is a new event series bringing artists’ film and writing into dialogue with the Sainsbury Collection to engage with key issues in contemporary art and museum practice.
This event will explore oceans, migration and diaspora with screenings of RESET by Alberta Whittle and In the Shadow of Our Ghosts by Ayesha Hameed and Hamedine Kane.
Alongside, artist Phoebe Boswell will read from her recent writing project Bodies of Water: A Confluence of Voices.
The event will also celebrate the recent publication of Oceans, edited by Sarah Wade and Pandora Syperek as part of the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series
This event is programmed in collaboration with UEA Art History.
Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and UEA Engagement Fund.
Alberta Whittle
RESET
Filmed across Barbados, South Africa and the United Kingdom, RESET is informed by the writings of queer theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, interweaving gothic imagery, fears of contagion, xenophobia and the ensuing moral panic that often follows such anxieties. Exploring timely questions relating to personal healing and the cultivation of hope in hostile environments, such as the present global pandemic or colonialism, this urgent political film strikes the balance between grief and reflection, empathy and desire. RESET (2020) was co-produced and co-commissioned by Forma and Frieze.
Ayesha Hameed and Hamedine Kane
In the Shadow of Our Ghosts
On April 29, 2006, a twenty-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, eleven bodies were found by the coastguards, preserved and desiccated by the sun and salt water. The ghost ship was adrift for four months on the Atlantic Ocean. It set sail on Christmas day in Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, full of migrants from Senegal, Guinea Bissau, and Gambia, en route to the Canary Islands. Four months later the boat was found on the coast of Barbados. Our film tries to imagine the time spent by the migrant to walk, alone in the desert spaces, Sahelian surroundings and urban spaces. The loneliness of the walker facing or with his shadow, the dialogue between the walker and his shadow is certainly a unique and intimate moment. A rare moment, precious even, facing a choice. So much so that it is probably useless and vain to relate it in any story. It is here where we launch into our collective imagination.
https://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/staff/hameed-ayesha/
https://palaisdetokyo.com/personne/hamedine-kane/
Phoebe Boswell
Bodies of Water: A Confluence of Voices
Phoebe Boswell will read aloud a new piece of writing developed during her 2022 writer’s residency at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Using storytelling to explore the deep and elemental cultural associations of water, Boswell considers bodies of water as a site of painful historical experience as well as renewal and hope.
Image credit: Film still of In the Shadow of Our Ghosts by Ayesha Hameed and Hamedine Kane.