In association with LUX, the ICO presents four new moving image commissions from artists Ayo Akingbade, B.O.S.S. Collective, Morgan Quaintance and Rehana Zaman.
These films are part of the ICO’s 2020 national film tour Second Sight which explores the legacy, methods, aesthetic strategies and histories of the UK Black Film Workshop Movement which developed throughout the 1980s.
Bringing key titles from the Movement to UK screens, the ICO and LUX have also commissioned these new works, created in response to the Workshop context.
This screening is followed by a post-screening discussion with the artists.
An ICO touring project in association with LUX, with support from the BFI Audience Fund and Arts Council England awarding National Lottery funding.
Programme:
Claudette’s Star, Ayo Akingbade, UK, 2019, 6 min.
Acting as a part ode and through a series of interpretations, Claudette’s Star depicts young artists considering with sheer wonder who is given a voice. Director Ayo Akingbade is a British Nigerian artist and filmmaker based in London who has produced a number of acclaimed artist films exploring the contemporary Black experience in London. Her recent films include Street 66 (2018) which premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam and A is for Artist (2018), which premiered in the Experimenta strand at the BFI London Film Festival.
Collective Hum, B.O.S.S. Collective, UK, 2019, 7 min.
A short film exploring the polyphony of collectivity in the desires, motivations and stories that foreground the histories and present(s) of Black British sound. Collective Hum documents a collective in practice through the operation of B.O.S.S using multiple narrations, overlapping voices and the sound of group interviews, meetings and events to create a polyphonic score to soundtrack images of the ‘collective bodies, kinaesthetic experience and gestural language’ of sound system culture.
Your Ecstatic Self, Rehana Zaman, UK, 2019, 32 min.
Your Ecstatic Self is a conversation unfolding in a car with Sajid, the artist’s brother. As the journey progresses Sajid discusses his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra, having spent the majority of his 44 years as a strict Sunni Pakistani Muslim. Placing the idiosyncrasies of western fetishism towards eastern philosophical traditions alongside cultural orthodoxies and ancestral knowledge, Your Ecstatic Self takes up multifaceted expressions of desire, intimacy and sexual agency.
South, Morgan Quaintance, UK, 2019, 28 min.
What kind of power is accessible through the discovery of a voice? Looking at personal and communal empowerment through vocal training and liberation movements in London and Chicago, South also explores what happens when speech is ignored, and the voice fades.
