This event will explore how still and moving images are constructed in relation to race, gender and culture, and how film, as a medium, facilitates different ways of framing these narratives. The selected films – Dreaming Rivers (1988), written and directed by filmmaker Martina Attille, and The Image that Spits, the Eye that Accumulates (2017), directed by filmmaker Rhea Storr – invite audiences to consider how the camera is used to explore images through imaginative, narrative and documentary practices.
Following the screening, Martina Attille and Rhea Storr will join curator and Ten.8 Curatorial Fellow Pelumi Odubanjo in conversation. Together they will examine the political, social and cultural contexts in which Ten.8 Magazine was produced in the 1980s, exploring its relevance today and its ongoing resonance with contemporary perspectives.
This event coincides with the current display dedicated to Ten.8.
About the films
Dreaming Rivers (1988) by Martina Attille explores the life of Ms T, performed by actor Corinne Skinner Carter, a black Caribbean woman in transition. Her children, Daughter (Angela Wynter), Sister (Nimmy March) and Sonny (Roderick Hart), sit at her bedside and attend to the unspoken intimacies of history and transnational belonging. 33 minutes.
In The Image that Spits, the Eye that Accumulates (2017), Rhea Storr uses narrative and archives to explore ideas of landscape and erosion in dialogue with the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures, drawing on her rural upbringing and British Bahamian heritage. Set in Norfolk’s coastal village of Happisburgh, the film navigates how a body, both two and three-dimensional, acquires language. 11 minutes.
In partnership with the International Curators Forum as part of ICF’s Ten.8 Research & Curatorial Fellowship, which is supported by Foyle Foundation and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
Biographies
Filmmaker Martina Attille graduated in 1983 from Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she produced her first film, By Any Other Name (1983). Attille became one of five founding members of the collective Sankofa Film & Video from 1983 to 1988, with Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz and Isaac Julian,
and Nadine Marsh-Edwards. Her seminal work for Sankofa Film & Video is Attille’s writer/director debut, Dreaming Rivers (1988), which features actors Corinne Skinner Carter, Angela Wynter, Nimmy March, Roderick Hart and Stefan Kalipha. The film has an original computer-generated score by composer Shirley Thompson, costume design by Lorna Lee Lesley, and set design by artist Sonia Boyce. In addition, US writer-director Dianne Houston supported Attille’s artistic development.
Attille has contributed installations, images, and essays to events and art publications including, Smile, for Mirage: Enigmas of Race Difference and Desire (ICA, 1995), Smile #2 for The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (1996), Still, in Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997), Saint Michael Stewart, 1994, in Today I shall judge nothing that occurs, Lyle Ashton Harris (2017) and ©2021(gold) with co-writer, artist Yasmin Nicholas, commissioned by artist Ima-Abasi Okon for the Tate Britain display research publication, Works from Tate’s Collection: Ima-Abasi Okon (2021).
Documentation of Attille’s presence within the visual arts community exists in work by David A. Bailey, The Passion of Remembrance production stills 1986; Sunil Gupta in a photo series for Sankofa Film & Video (1986); David Lewis in a photo series for Sankofa Film & Video in the style of Robert Freeman’s cover shot for the album With the Beatles (unpublished); Christine Parry, Dreaming Rivers production stills (1987); Ingrid Pollard, Self -Evident (1995); Sonia Boyce, The Devotional Wallpaper (2008); Lubaina Himid, Thin Black Line(s): Moments and Connections (2015); Ajamu: Studios (2021).
Attille is currently concluding her thesis, Africandescence, an enquiry into the onscreen performativity of British black women in avant-garde films, an AHRC TECHNE practice-based PhD research project, hosted by University of the Arts London.
Rhea Storr explores Black and mixed-race cultural representation with an interest in the in-between, the culturally ineffable, translation, format and aesthetics. Her work is often concerned with Caribbean diaspora in the UK. This includes an interest in representing Black subjects in rural spaces and the politics of masquerade. Frequently working in photochemical film practices, Storr considers counter-cultural ways of producing moving-image. She is currently a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths focusing on Black experimental filmmakers and the use of 16mm film and is a former co-director of a filmmaker's co-operative 'not nowhere'.
Selected exhibitions/screenings include: BFI London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Blackstar Festival, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Museum of African American History and Culture, Somerset House, Whitechapel Gallery and Lisson Gallery. She is the winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2020, Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize and won the Royal Photographic Society’s Award for Creative Contribution to Art in Moving Image 2023.
Pelumi Odubanjo is a curator, writer, and researcher based between London and Glasgow. Pelumi works with photographic archives, artists and cultural artefacts to create and explore dialogues across global Black diasporas and geographies. Pelumi is currently a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Glasgow and a recipient of the James McCune Smith Scholarship where she is researching the historical and contemporary trans-Atlantic relationship between Nigeria and Brazil through image-making and photographic representation. Pelumi is the ICF’s (The International Curator’s Forum) Ten.8 Research & Curatorial Fellow.
By booking for this event you agree to our Terms & Conditions.
