- Opening Event: Sun 20 March 2022, 2pm-5pm, no booking required
- Join us for a conversation with Adam Lewis Jacob, Muhammad Idrish, Claude Nouk and Jemma Desai at 3pm. Idrish (ইদ্রিস) will be on view from 2 to 5pm.
LUX is proud to present a new film by artist Adam Lewis Jacob. Filmed in Bangladesh and Birmingham during 2020, Idrish (ইদ্রিস) is an urgent and timely reflection on the anti-deportation movement and anti-racist community action refracted through the story of veteran anti-deportation campaigner Muhammad Idrish.
Beginning with a reading of Bidrohi (The Rebel / “বিদ্রোহী”) a revolutionary Bengali poem written by Kazi Nazrul Islam in 1921 the film recounts Muhammad Idrish’s journey and fight to remain in the UK in the 1980s and the trade union led campaign that supported him. The campaign to stop Muhammad’s deportation received widespread support, including from his trade union NALGO (now UNISON). Documented by the Birmingham Trade Union Research Council’s video initiative, TURC Video, the fight was taken up nationally, creating a powerful moment of unity between the anti-racist and trade union movements.
Lewis Jacob and Idrish travelled to Bangladesh in 2020 to visit and film at locations significant to him, this is overlaid with his own testimony of a lifetime of campaigning. Addressing personal history and journey from Bangladesh to the UK in the broader consideration of rights and civil liberties, the film addresses the personal impact of policies which echo through time to the ‘hostile environment’ of present day Britain.
Developed through Lewis Jacob’s research into counter culture movements and drawing on the archives of the Birmingham Trade Union Resource Centre. The film weaves a complex tapestry of found materials from VHS to photographs and campaigning materials, deftly animating the aesthetics of historical resistance alongside Idrish’s personal narrative, and collapsing time and space to create an urgent montage of personal/political resistance. This is complemented by Claude Nouk’s sound design which mirrors the visual approach, looping and remixing archival sounds to add propulsive urgency to the film’s narrative.
The exhibition will also include a selection of ‘camera tapes’, unedited raw footage shot on U-matic tape and recently digitised by TURC video worker Marian Hall who along with Ranbir Bains, a student at the time, collaborated with Idrish to make the West Midlands Anti-deportation Campaign video. A series of contextual events will accompany the exhibition as well as a new essay by writer Jemma Desai.
