Tuesday, May 2, 2023 at 7:30pm
Colonial Stutters
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Curated by Yasmina Price
Moune Ô, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, 2022, digital projection, 16 mins
Halimuhfack, Christopher Harris, 2016, digital projection, 4 mins
Missing Time, Morgan Quaintance, 2019, digital projection, 14 mins
Towards a Black Testimony, Languid Hands, 2019—, digital projection, 36 mins
The records of empire are a smooth surface of forgetting. Nothing less than a totalizing amnesia could transform brutal histories of conquest, genocide, and exploitation into tidy stories of progress, development, and universal freedom. The technologies of cinema have served this purpose well, imposing and stabilizing dominant narratives in the service of maintaining the dominant orders of power.
Yet cinema also holds the possibility of counter-narratives—works that steal away from the official records to show what they hid or were never able to hold. Such experiments have acted as the glitch, the rupture, the stutter in the polished continuity of the stories capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism tell about themselves.
This quartet of films reveals the improvised interruptions of liberation. Languid Hands (Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson), Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Morgan Quaintance, and Christopher Harris play and study through disobedient black visual practices. In unexpected ways, these artists create disjointed choreographies and restless sounds that function as invitations to reconsider what seems obvious. Each of their works beautifully misuse archival materials that were meant to function as closed containers, animating repurposed footage towards different ends.
From an understanding that neither the integrity of a body nor a nation nor a narrative is ever static, these artists use movement, repetition, metamorphosis, and ritual to summon the forgotten and nurture fragmented memories. This almost-May Day Screening—another stutter in time—is an occasion to look cleared-eyed at the ugly totalities of unfreedom, and the places where their undoing begins.
- YP
Yasmina Price is a writer, programmer, and scholar focused on black cinema and anti-colonial visual culture.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.
Above: still from Halimuhfack.