Co-op Dialogues 1966-2016: John Akomfrah and Louis Henderson

2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), a ground-breaking organisation that pioneered a tradition for the production, distribution, and exhibition of artists’ moving image in the United Kingdom. To mark this anniversary Tate Britain and LUX present a monthly series of screenings and artists’ conversations revisiting the legacy of the London Film-makers’ Co-op and its significance today.
A seminal figure of British documentary and ‘engaged’ cinema, John Akomfrah (b.1957) is a filmmaker and artist whose work investigates the relationship between memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics, through the experience of the African diaspora in Europe and the USA. He was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), a cine cultural group dedicated to exploring questions of Black British identity, race and class through film and media in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999, he set up Smoking Dogs with BAFC collaborators David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, in order to produce works that simultaneously cohabit the worlds of film, art and broadcast.
A generation younger, Louis Henderson (b. 1983) makes films that examine the networked links between colonialism, technology, capitalism and history, offering materialist readings of the Internet and digital technologies to reveal certain sedimented processes of exploitation.
A selection of works by John Akomfrah and Louis Henderson will be screened, followed by a conversation between the artists.

Programme

Memory Room 451, 1997, John Akomfrah, 22min
Lettres du Voyant, 2013, Louis Henderson, 40min