African Film Institute: Sosena Solomon, Mpho Matsipa, Natacha Nsabimana

A conversation between filmmaker Sosena Solomon, designer and urban scholar/theorist Mpho Matsipa, and anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana.  This episode was recorded at e-flux Screening Room before a screening of Merkato, curated by Natacha Nsabimana. Sosena Solomon’s Merkato is a documentary tracing the lives of four people as they navigate the demands of life and work in one of the biggest markets in Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Filmed on location in Merkato, before a radical architectural transformation, Solomon’s documentary invites us to ask expansive questions about space, architecture, transition, and preservation. Sosena Solomon is an Ethiopian-American social documentary film and multimedia visual artist whose work explores cross-sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives through arresting visual storytelling. Solomon has worked for many years in the commercial and nonprofit sectors as a director and cinematographer on many short film projects, including Dreaming of Jerusalem, a Discovery-plus original documentary about the Ethiopian-Jewish community in Gondar, and Merkato. She has exhibited work at the Sundance Film Festival, Cinema Africa, Tribeca, and DOC NYC. She earned her BA in Television Production from Temple University and her MFA in Social Documentary film from the School of Visual Arts. Solomon is currently lecturing in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and working with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe the Museum’s African art galleries. Mpho Matsipa is an educator, researcher, and independent curator.  Matsipa holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, pursued as a Fulbright Scholar. She has curated several exhibitions, discursive platforms, and experimental architectural research including the Venice International Architecture Biennale (2008; 2021); African Mobilities at the Architecture Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2018); and Studio-X Johannesburg, in South Africa (2014–16). Her curatorial and research interests are at the intersection of urban studies, experimental architecture, and visual art. Mpho is an associate curator for the Lubumbashi Biennale, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2024) and she teaches History and Theory at SCI-Arc. Natacha Nsabimana teaches in the anthropology department at the university of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial critique, musical movements, and the cultural and political worlds of African peoples on the continent and in the diaspora. The African Film Institute aims to create a home and a place of intimacy with African cinema in New York, through developing gradually and organically a viewing program animated by fellowships; a growing library; an active writers’ room; and an expanding catalog of recorded dialogs. The African Film Institute draws from the visual cultures that view cinema as an evening school: a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination—employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods informed by different uses of time, visual and textual histories, and social struggles and hopes in mutuality between their own locality and the world at large. The African Film Institute is convened by Christian Nyampeta and hosted by e-flux Screening Room.

Ben Eastham talks to artist Alice Wang. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Alice Wang’s sculptural forms shine a light on the uncanny forces that shape the physical world. Using material such as fossils, meteorites, moss, and heat—ranging from leftover radiation from the Big Bang to the wax secreted by bees—her work aims to reconfigure our understanding of reality.     Intro sound: excerpt from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), COSMOS (Soundtrack for 14th Shanghai Biennale), 2023. 14 tracks, overall 117:30 minutes.

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Nolan Oswald Dennis. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. In his para-disciplinary artistic practice, Nolan Oswald Dennis explores “a Black consciousness of space”—the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization—questioning spacetime histories through system-specific interventions, sculptures, and drawings. Black Liberation Zodiac: Khunuseti focuses on a group of stars known in isiZulu as isiLimela (in English, the Pleiades) whose appearance over the southern hemisphere horizon in June signals the beginning of the season of planting, rites of adulthood, and other cyclical transitions. As these stars appear in the southern hemisphere they simultaneously disappear in the northern hemisphere. Their path across the equator reveals a condition of common difference which echoes planetary geopolitical relations. This work is part of the “Black Liberation Zodiac” (2017 - ∞ ) series which remaps the night sky across the ecliptic plane as a set of star charts based on the IAU celestial-coordinate system. This series replaces the hegemonic constellation system derived from Eurasian mythological history with imagery drawn from the archive of black liberation iconography. Taking cues from circumpolar and seasonal constellations which are visible exclusively in either the northern or southern hemisphere, Dennis works on the premise that there are always, at a minimum, two night skies. This series explores the poetics of a multi-celestial world through iterative installations referencing planetarium displays, science museums, and southern Afri-indigenous cosmologies.

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Thotti. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Thotti works at the frontier between trance and nothingness, the image and its oblivion, motion and remembrance, cinema and its expansion. As he puts it: “South Atlantic dissolved in the world’s skies.”  Read more about his installation for the Shanghai Biennale, (Mo) Crossing to the End and the Beginning Again, via the Institute of the Cosmos website.

Ben Eastham talks to artist Lucile Desamory. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Lucile Desamory works at the frontiers of perception and cognition, with a special interest in what the Berlin-based artist refers to as the “too-much, the falsified, and spurned narratives.” The breadth of her pursuit is reflected in the diversity of her approach, which uses film, painting, embroidery, photography, and her voice. Often working in collaboration, her oeuvre extends to theatrical works, feature-length films, and a television show currently in production.

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Heidi Lau. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham.  Heidi Lau’s luminous ceramics evoke architectural ruins, funerary vessels, and mythological creatures. Channeling the artist’s personal history, the syncretic cultures of her native Macau, and the diasporic experience, Lau transforms Taoist ritual tokens of mourning and remembrance into what Kang Kang describes as “oblique monuments for an impossible ancestry.”   Intro sound: excerpt from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), COSMOS (Soundtrack for 14th Shanghai Biennale), 2023. 14 tracks, overall 117:30 minutes.

Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Ciarán Finlayson about his book, Perpetual Slavery, published by Floating Opera Press in 2023.   In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery. Finlayson suggests that these two artists’ work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and its interpretation by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery.    Ciarán Finlayson is an editor from Houston, Texas. He is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy. Finlayson is on the core faculty of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York, and has taught aesthetics and social theory at Columbia University, New York, and the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and at socialist night schools hosted by the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

A conversation preceding the African Film Institute’s inaugural screening at e-flux curated by Natacha Nsabimana, featuring two works by Rwandan filmmaker Amelia Umuhire. The African Film Institute is convened by Christian Nyampeta and hosted by e-flux Screening Room. Amelia Umuhire (b. 1991, Kigali, Rwanda) is a filmmaker and artist living in Kigali and Berlin. In 2015, she wrote and directed the award-winning web-series Polyglot, in which she follows the lives of young, deracinated London- and Berlin-based Rwandese artists. Her short film Mugabo was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and screened at MOCA Los Angeles and the Berlin Biennale among many other places. In 2018, Umuhire produced the Prix Europa-nominated radio feature Vaterland for the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She was a Villa Romana Fellow in 2020, and is currently working on her first feature film. Natacha Nsabimana teaches in the anthropology department at the university of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial critique, musical movements, and the cultural and political worlds of African peoples on the continent and in the diaspora. The African Film Institute aims to create a home and a place of intimacy with African cinema in New York, through developing gradually and organically a viewing program animated by fellowships; a growing library; an active writers’ room; and an expanding catalog of recorded dialogs. The African Film Institute draws from the visual cultures that view cinema as an evening school: a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination—employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods informed by different uses of time, visual and textual histories, and social struggles and hopes in mutuality between their own locality and the world at large. 

Tamara Khasanova and Hallie Ayres talk to artist Saodat Ismailova following To Share a Dream With a River, a screening of three films at e-flux. Stay tuned after the conversation for an excerpt from a soundscape composed by Camille Norment for Ismailova’s film, The Haunted. Films discussed in this episode: The Haunted (2017, 23 minutes) takes the form of an open letter to the Turan tiger. A majestic symbol of the Central Asian landscape, this animal has been extinct for several decades but lives on as a sacred symbol in the collective imagination of the local population. In her captivating film essay, Ismailova pays homage to the tiger as she shows how firmly bound it is to the region’s history. Stains of Oxus (2016, 24 minutes) follows a transformation of the landscape of the Amu Darya riverbanks and the people that inhabit them, beginning from the high plateau in Tajikistan to the lowland deserts in Uzbekistan, where the river finds its end. Chillpiq (2018, 17 minutes) begins with a scene of two buses emerging on the horizon as they drive toward Chillpiq. A group of forty girls climb the ruins that stand atop a mount in the middle of the steppe. One by one, they tie pieces of cloth to a flagpole that crowns the archeological site, and worship it as a symbol of life. The girls circle the shrine while the setting sun changes the light to an orange glow, blurring their silhouettes as they disappear into the site. Two Horizons (2022, 24 mins) was exhibited as part of the 14th Shanghai Biennale’s Partial Eclipse section, and hints at infinite strategies through which humans access occluded forms of matter and energy. Two Horizons combines a prophecy carried down in the ancient Turkic oral histories of Qorqut with the more recent history of a space launch facility. The tomb of Qorqut—the storyteller and seer who is the central hero of the epic—lies in the south of Kazakhstan, near the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In the local culture the belief persists that a person will one day come to defeat gravity and achieve eternal life.    Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist who came of age in the post-Soviet era in Central Asia. She graduated from Tashkent State Art Institute in Uzbekistan and Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts in France. Drawing on the cultural identities and vernacular histories of Central Asia, Saodat Ismailova’s films meditate on memory, spirituality, immortality, and extinction. Frequently based around folk stories in which women are the lead protagonists, and exploring systems of knowledge suppressed by globalized modernity, these consciousness expanding works hover between visible and invisible worlds.  Tamara Khasanova is a curator, researcher, and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She currently serves as an Archives Assistant at e-flux, and curated the To Share a Dream With a River screening program. Hallie Ayres was on the curatorial team for Cosmos Cinema, the 14th Shanghai Biennale. She is Associate Director of e-flux.

Recorded live at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, September 5, 2023 during a retrospective screening of selected works by Laure Prouvost. The pre-screening introduction by Amal Issa and Laure Prouvost is followed by a conversation between the artist and writer-curator Kathy Noble. The screening portion of the program featured a selection of works spanning the last decade: OWT (2007, 3 minutes), Finger Point Green (2010, 3 minutes), They Parlaient Idéale (29 minutes, 2019), Every Sunday, Grandma (2022, 7 minutes), OMA JE (You, My, Omma, Mama, Shadow Does, and A Walking Story) (2023, 22 minutes). Language—in its broadest sense—permeates the video, sound, installation, and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that weave in film in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images, and meaning. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex works that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality. At once seductive and jarring, her approach to filmmaking employs layered storytelling, quick edits, montage, and wordplay, and is composed of a rich, tactile assortment of images, sounds, and spoken and written phrases.    Laure Prouvost (b. 1867, Lieumeconu, France) lives and works. Here a long list of museums and institutions. A line, interesting things, a coma, a line, a list of residencies and prizes. A selection of solo projects including: an Oma-je in Vienna, a flying Grandma in Oslo, Esmé Blue in Busan, Helsinki, and Madrid, an elastic arm hold in tight in Copenhagen, a Swallowing and Breathing in Eindhoven, a Smoking Mother in Copenhagen, a Melting Into Another in Lisbon and Sonsbeek, an Occupied Paradise in Aalst, Deep See Blue Surrounding You in Venice, Toulouse, and Lille, a Waiting Room with objects in Minneapolis, a New Museum for Granddad in Milano, a tearoom for Grandma in Derry, a karaoke room in Brussels, a new octopus ink vodka bar for Gregor in Rotterdam, A travel agency for an Uncle in Frankfurt, a lobby for love among the artists in the Hague and Luzern… tea bags, and wet floors and tentacules. Kathy Noble is a curator and writer based in New York, currently working as Senior Curator at Performa. There she previously served as Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial Affairs to oversee the program and curated numerous commissions. As Curator, Interdisciplinary, at Tate Modern she co-curated Tate Modern Live, The Long Weekend Festival, and Art in Action, the first program in The Tanks spaces. In 2016 she launched the inaugural Art Night festival with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, presenting ten site-specific projects at venues across Westminster. She has published numerous essays in books and magazines such as Artforum, frieze, and Mousse Magazine.