Worlding Public Cultures will screen a programme of artists’ film to accompany the symposium consent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean, 1st to 3rd December 2021, as counterpoints to the panel discussions formed around the influential work of Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter.
The programme reflects some of the key thematics that shape the symposium, and includes recent works by Rhea Storr and Jamilah Sabur that contemplate Caribbean cultural traditions as ontological praxis, and the profound harmony and resistance of carnival and spiritual practices. Personal counter-histories in the work of Helen Cammock unravel the legacy of the sugar trade in the Caribbean as a struggle to understand the realities of forced labour, value and loss. Works by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman and Alberta Whittle confront the lived and embodied precarities of ecological catastrophe, and the elemental rhythms and interconnectedness of human experience with seismic geological and climatic events.
The programme will stream on this page for 72 hours from 12.00 (GMT) on Wednesday 1st December.
With thanks to the artists and LUX.
Programme
Rhea Storr
Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical, 2020
10 minutes
Afrofuturism is communicated via the Bahamian people through Junkanoo, a form of carnival in the Bahamas, originally celebrated by the enslaved who were given Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s day off only. The history of Junkanoo is political as much as aesthetic. The film follows the ‘Shell Saxons Superstars’, producing a portrait of not only the parade but examines the way in which the Saxons organise space, questioning the effect of their organisation and how they are culturally represented. ‘Black radical imagination’ is a term used by Robin Kelley, predominantly to describe US Black radical organising in the 20th Century. The film instead aims to utilise a geographical location and history that is Caribbean focused. ‘Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical’ also voices the innovations of Junkanoo within an experimental film history, one which draws on the aesthetics of 1980’s Black film workshops that do not adhere to documentary realism, but produces counter narratives. A 16mm cyanotype blue wash is the signal of Black imaginative life. Its mission is to communicate an incommunicability: knowledge that is enacted or performed to which film cannot do justice.
Click here for artist's biography
Rhea Storr is an artist filmmaker who explores the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures; masquerade as a site of protest or subversion is an ongoing theme in her work, and the effect of place or space on cultural representation. Occasionally she draws on her rural upbringing and British Bahamian heritage. Rhea Storr often works in 16mm film; she considers that analogue film might be useful to Black artists, both in the aesthetics it creates and the production models it facilitates. She is currently undertaking a PhD entitled, 'Towards a Black British Aesthetic: How is Black Radical Imagination realised through 16mm filmmaking practices?' She is a co-director of not nowhere an artists’ film co-operative in London, that has a particular focus on analogue film. She is resident at Somerset House, London and occasionally programs at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. She is the winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2020, and the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize. She was educated at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art.
Jamilah Sabur
Obra, 2019
3 minutes
Obra reflects upon metaphysical practices in Jamaica. Obra combines scenes recorded at The Cardiff Hall, a former plantation in Saint Ann Parish and the Spanish Town mosque, built in the mid-twentieth century by an Indian immigrant Mohammed Khan. With imagery of white tunics, beekeeping suits, the Ethiopian flag and archival footage of Haile Selassie at the League of Nations, Geneva in 1936; together, they create a serene tapestry draped across the Jamaican landscape.
Courtesy the artist and Copperfield, London.
Click here for artist's biography
Jamilah Sabur draws on geology, memory and language as points of reference. Her work considers what it means to see on a planetary scale, re-calibrating our understanding of place, time and history. Her recent solo exhibitions include: DADA Holdings, Nina Johnson, Miami (2021); Bulk Pangaea, New Orleans Lakefront Airport as part of the triennial Prospect. 5 New Orleans: Yesterday we said tomorrow (2021); La montagne fredonne sous l’océan/The mountain sings underwater, Fondation PHI, Momenta Biennale, Montréal, Québec (2021), Observations: Selected Works by Jamilah Sabur, University of Maryland Art Gallery (2020); recent group exhibitions include: The Willfulness of Objects, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2020); Mending the Sky, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (2020); Here Be Dragons, Copperfield, London (2020). Sabur earned a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2009), and an MFA from University of California, San Diego (2014).
Helen Cammock
There’s a Hole in the Sky Part I, 2016
19 minutes
Shot on location in Barbados, There’s a Hole in the Sky Part I asks questions about worth and value – both cultural and human. In this film, Cammock interacts with workers from two sites: one of the last sugar factories in Barbados, a tourist sugar grind, and rum plantation. The fragmented dialogue around labour and cultural transference develops a disjunction through prose and song, between what is seen and what is heard. The script extends from Cammock’s writing, research and found excerpts from newspapers and texts from writers including Maya Angelou, and Barbadians George Lamming and Derek Walcott.
Click here for artist's biography
Helen Cammock explores social histories through film, photography, print, text, song and performance. She is motivated by her commitment to questioning mainstream historical narratives around blackness, womanhood, wealth, power, poverty and vulnerability. Mining her own biography in addition to the histories of oppression and resistance, multiple and layered narratives reveal the cyclical nature of histories.
Cammock was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize 2019, and the 7th Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Recent exhibitions include STUK Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium (2021); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2020); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2019); VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Reading Museum in Reading, UK; Cubitt, London, UK (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at British Art Show 9, Aberdeen, Scotland (2021); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2020); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2020); Somerset House, London, UK (2019); Hollybush Gardens, London, UK (2017 and 2013) and Firstsite, Colchester, UK. She has also staged performances at Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2020); The Showroom, London, UK (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2017); Cubitt, London; VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland and the ICA, London, UK (2017).
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman
4 Waters - Deep Implicancy, 2019
31 minutes
4 Waters - Deep Implicancy is a retelling of the Haitian Revolution from the perspective of an earthquake in 1784. This earthquake marked an indigenous foretelling of Black Independence and the revolution that would come twenty years later, temporarily shaking the entrenched social order of colonial hierarchy as the enslaved fled for safety to the mountains and plantations grounded to a halt. At a cosmic level, it brought knowledge from the first metric of time. Crossing four waters – the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, they follow the displacement of peoples alongside the movement of clouds, ideas, earth, and migration of matter, at a quantum level, from one state to another. Combining disparate geographies and bodies of/in water, they consider four historically and cosmically contentious islands within them – Lesvos, Marshall Islands, Haiti, Tiwi. The film addresses urgent global issues including migration, displacement, legacies of colonialism and ecological devastation, presenting a reimagined pre-life cosmos of gathered and imagined knowledges, a time without time that Ferreira da Silva describes as ‘Deep Implicancy’.
Click for Biographies
Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that’s why he has two passports. He is an artist, filmmaker and writer. With recent presentations at CCA Glasgow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Manifesta 10, Marseille; Showroom Gallery, London; TPW Gallery, Toronto; Forum Expanded, Berlin Berlinale; Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; Berlin Biennial 10, Germany; Serpentine, London X Qalandia Biennial, Palestine; Gasworks, London; Bold Tendencies, London, UK; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT and Docslisboa, Portugal; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; Industry of Light, London; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt; at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art in Seoul, amongst others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings and e-flux.
Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. Her work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, 2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and published in art venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and e-flux.
Alberta Whittle
Between a Whisper and a Cry, 2019
37 minutes
Hinging on memory, trauma and the afterlives of colonialism, Between a Whisper and a Cry combines archival footage, contemporary stories, happenings and events, narrative texts and voices, by using sound and oral histories as forms of knowledge. Weather is an important visual and audio element of the film, referencing the legacy of colonial extraction as the starting point for present-day climate instability in the Caribbean, while drawing parallels with the exploitation inherent to the contemporary tourist industry. For Whittle, understanding the past becomes the foundation for moving towards present-day healing and nurturing. Through the film, viewers are encouraged to synchronise their bodies to the rhythm of Whittle’s breathing and the conditions of ocean life, invoking a sense of compassion, kinship, groundedness and understanding within one’s own body.
Click for Biography
Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher, and curator. Her creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture, and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces. She was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. Alberta is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh College of Art, and is a Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. She was a RAW Academie Fellow at RAW Material in Dakar in 2018, and is the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/9. Current and upcoming projects include Fragments of Epic Memory, AGO, Toronto; We are History, Somerset House, London; Sex Ecologies, Kunstal Trondheim; Life Between Islands, Caribbean-British Artists 1950s – now, Tate Britain, London; British Art Show 9; Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism, Hayward Gallery Touring. In 2022 she will represent Scotland at the 59th Biennale di Venezia.
Alberta has exhibited and performed in various solo and group shows, including Jupiter Artland (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2021), Lisson Gallery (2021), MIMA (2021), Viborg Kunstal (2021), Remai Modern (2021), Liverpool Biennale (2021), Art Night London (2021), The British Art Show, Aberdeen (2021), Glasgow International (2020 and 2021), Grand Union (2020), Eastside Projects (2020), DCA (2019), GoMA, Glasgow (2019), Pig Rock Bothy at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019), the 13th Havana Biennale, Cuba (2019), The Tyburn Gallery, London (2019), The City Arts Centre, Edinburgh (2019), The Showroom, London (2018), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (2018), RAW Material, Dakar (2018), FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2018), the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017), FRAMER FRAMED, Amsterdam (2015), Goethe On Main, Johannesburg (2015), at the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015), and BOZAR, Brussels (2014), amongst others.
Helen Cammock
There’s a Hole in the Sky Part I, 2016
19 minutes
Shot on location in Barbados, There’s a Hole in the Sky Part I asks questions about worth and value – both cultural and human. In this film, Cammock interacts with workers from two sites: one of the last sugar factories in Barbados, a tourist sugar grind, and rum plantation. The fragmented dialogue around labour and cultural transference develops a disjunction through prose and song, between what is seen and what is heard. The script extends from Cammock’s writing, research and found excerpts from newspapers and texts from writers including Maya Angelou, and Barbadians George Lamming and Derek Walcott.
Click here for artist's biography
Helen Cammock explores social histories through film, photography, print, text, song and performance. She is motivated by her commitment to questioning mainstream historical narratives around blackness, womanhood, wealth, power, poverty and vulnerability. Mining her own biography in addition to the histories of oppression and resistance, multiple and layered narratives reveal the cyclical nature of histories.
Cammock was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize 2019, and the 7th Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Recent exhibitions include STUK Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium (2021); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2020); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2019); VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Reading Museum in Reading, UK; Cubitt, London, UK (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at British Art Show 9, Aberdeen, Scotland (2021); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2020); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2020); Somerset House, London, UK (2019); Hollybush Gardens, London, UK (2017 and 2013) and Firstsite, Colchester, UK. She has also staged performances at Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2020); The Showroom, London, UK (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2017); Cubitt, London; VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland and the ICA, London, UK (2017).
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman
4 Waters - Deep Implicancy, 2019
31 minutes
4 Waters - Deep Implicancy is a retelling of the Haitian Revolution from the perspective of an earthquake in 1784. This earthquake marked an indigenous foretelling of Black Independence and the revolution that would come twenty years later, temporarily shaking the entrenched social order of colonial hierarchy as the enslaved fled for safety to the mountains and plantations grounded to a halt. At a cosmic level, it brought knowledge from the first metric of time. Crossing four waters – the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, they follow the displacement of peoples alongside the movement of clouds, ideas, earth, and migration of matter, at a quantum level, from one state to another. Combining disparate geographies and bodies of/in water, they consider four historically and cosmically contentious islands within them – Lesvos, Marshall Islands, Haiti, Tiwi. The film addresses urgent global issues including migration, displacement, legacies of colonialism and ecological devastation, presenting a reimagined pre-life cosmos of gathered and imagined knowledges, a time without time that Ferreira da Silva describes as ‘Deep Implicancy’.
Click here for artists' biographies
Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that’s why he has two passports. He is an artist, filmmaker and writer. With recent presentations at CCA Glasgow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Manifesta 10, Marseille; Showroom Gallery, London; TPW Gallery, Toronto; Forum Expanded, Berlin Berlinale; Jameel Art Centre, Dubai; Berlin Biennial 10, Germany; Serpentine, London X Qalandia Biennial, Palestine; Gasworks, London; Bold Tendencies, London, UK; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT and Docslisboa, Portugal; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; Bergen Assembly, Norway; at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; the 56th Venice Biennale and SuperCommunity; Industry of Light, London; the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt; at Ashkal Alwan and the Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon; Le Gaite Lyric, Paris; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Rat School of Art in Seoul, amongst others. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings and e-flux.
Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. Her work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, 2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and published in art venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and e-flux.
Alberta Whittle
Between a Whisper and a Cry, 2019
37 minutes
Hinging on memory, trauma and the afterlives of colonialism, Between a Whisper and a Cry combines archival footage, contemporary stories, happenings and events, narrative texts and voices, by using sound and oral histories as forms of knowledge. Weather is an important visual and audio element of the film, referencing the legacy of colonial extraction as the starting point for present-day climate instability in the Caribbean, while drawing parallels with the exploitation inherent to the contemporary tourist industry. For Whittle, understanding the past becomes the foundation for moving towards present-day healing and nurturing. Through the film, viewers are encouraged to synchronise their bodies to the rhythm of Whittle’s breathing and the conditions of ocean life, invoking a sense of compassion, kinship, groundedness and understanding within one’s own body.
Click here for artist's biography
Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher, and curator. Her creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture, and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces. She was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. Alberta is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh College of Art, and is a Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. She was a RAW Academie Fellow at RAW Material in Dakar in 2018, and is the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/9. Current and upcoming projects include Fragments of Epic Memory, AGO, Toronto; We are History, Somerset House, London; Sex Ecologies, Kunstal Trondheim; Life Between Islands, Caribbean-British Artists 1950s – now, Tate Britain, London; British Art Show 9; Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism, Hayward Gallery Touring. In 2022 she will represent Scotland at the 59th Biennale di Venezia.
Alberta has exhibited and performed in various solo and group shows, including Jupiter Artland (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2021), Lisson Gallery (2021), MIMA (2021), Viborg Kunstal (2021), Remai Modern (2021), Liverpool Biennale (2021), Art Night London (2021), The British Art Show, Aberdeen (2021), Glasgow International (2020 and 2021), Grand Union (2020), Eastside Projects (2020), DCA (2019), GoMA, Glasgow (2019), Pig Rock Bothy at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019), the 13th Havana Biennale, Cuba (2019), The Tyburn Gallery, London (2019), The City Arts Centre, Edinburgh (2019), The Showroom, London (2018), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (2018), RAW Material, Dakar (2018), FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2018), the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017), FRAMER FRAMED, Amsterdam (2015), Goethe On Main, Johannesburg (2015), at the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015), and BOZAR, Brussels (2014), amongst others.