Jarman Now!

12pm  – Zilkha Auditorium

Welcome and Introduction, Onyeka Igwe in conversation with Dr Jareh Das.
Igwe will be joined in conversation by Das to discuss their latest projects across film, performance and writing.

12:10 – 2.40pm – Study Studio

Films in the Jarman Award Touring Programme 2022 

12:45pm – Zilkha Auditorium

Morgan Quaintance performative talk: (Back)Slide Show 
Quaintance presents a collection of music clips, new photographs and moving image material. Using a traditional slide show format as the formal point of departure, themes present in his film Surviving You, Always (2020) and some additional context surrounding events covered in the film, will be explored through the artist’s spoken narration.

1:30pm

Break

2.10 – 3.45 – Zilkha Auditorium

Derek Jarman: Three films and an exclusive listening experience

2:15pm – Creative Studio

Alberta Whittle Reading
Whittle will be reading a text from their recent film work ‘Lagareh – The Last Born’, commissioned and produced for her solo presentation at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, where she represented Scotland. This reading will be followed by an informal conversation between Alberta and Lisa Anderson, Managing Director (Interim) of Black Cultural Archives, London, which is the only national heritage centre dedicated to collecting, preserving, and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain.

2.40-3.15pm – Study Studio

Filmed Interviews with Jarman Award 2022 Artists 

3pm – Creative Studio

Rosa-Johan Uddoh reading: Practice Makes Perfect
Uddoh will present readings from their new book Practice Makes Perfect, co-published by Book Works and Focal Point Gallery, which focuses on themes of radical self-love, inspired by black feminist practice and writing. Through performance, film, installation and sound, Uddoh explores an infatuation with places, objects and celebrities in British popular culture, and the effects of these on self-formation. Followed by a Q&A with Lola Olufemi.

3.15 – 5.45pm – Study Studio

Films in the Jarman Award Touring Programme 2022 

3:45pm
Break

4:05pm- Zilkha Audtorium

Grace Ndiritu in conversation 

Ndiritu and Céline Condorelli will discuss Ndiritu’s film Black Beauty (2021), which is nominated for this year’s Jarman Award; and was also selected by Condorelli to be part of her recent mid-career survey at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh. Both artists were part of the artistic team who curated and exhibited in the critically acclaimed exhibition ‘Our Silver City: 2094’ at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021.

5pm – Zilkha Auditorium

Jamie Crewe artist talk: DEMONIC HALF-PERSON 
In this artist’s talk, Crewe will discuss a technique that recurs throughout their practice. They have named this technique DEMONIC HALF-PERSON, and it describes positions or states of inhumanity, and things that are not quite people.
What might be escaped when humanity is shrugged off, or torn from you like a shoulderless gown? What are you licensed to do to a person who is not (fully, completely, or correctly) a person? What does everyone else have that I am missing? This talk will chart the recurrence of such questions and themes across their life and practice.

6pm
Close

Films by the shortlisted artists will be available to view throughout the day in the Whitechapel Gallery Study Studio. The touring programme will loop twice throughout the day, firstly from 12:10–2:40pm and again from 3:15–5:45pm. Short interviews with the shortlisted artists will screen 2:40–3:15pm in the same space, and will be viewable on the monitor in the Whitechapel Gallery foyer throughout the day.

12:10pm & 3:15pm
Grace Ndiritu, Black Beauty (2021), 29 mins

African fashion model Alexandra Cartier (aka Black Beauty) is doing a photo shoot advert for Black Beauty ecological face cream in the desert of Patagonia. When Alexandra is saying her lines, the blazing desert sun momentarily blinds her and she goes into a momentary cosmic hallucinatory state. Her inner vision shows a sound-stage with her as a Late Night talk show host called Karen Roberts, interviewing Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges about Climate change, pandemics, migration and Time.

12:40pm & 3:45pm
Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive (2020), 20 mins

a so-called archive interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot in two separate colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, UK—this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ‘lost’ from these archives, mixing genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.

1pm & 4:05pm
Alberta Whittle, Lagareh – The Last Born (2022), 43 mins

Shot on location in Scotland, England, Sierra Leone and Barbados and featuring footage from Venice, Lagareh – The Last Born brings together histories and communities that connect across these geographies to decipher different modes of not only taking care of the dead and confronting grief but also imagining how to create families of kithship. Whittle embraces storytelling as a means of exploring ideas of displacement but also family and community.

The themes of the film build on ideas of the Caribbean Gothic and Hauntology, but are also bound by the desire to cultivate hope and personal healing as forms of resistance against a background of catastrophe. The film is intended to offer an insight into different potential layers of resistance that allow for Black love to be situated in proximity with historical sites of trauma that Whittle re-inscribes with rage, hope and exhaustion.

1:43pm & 4:48pm
Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Black Poirot (2018-2021), 21 mins

Black Poirot is a 20-minute ride on the Orientalised-Other Express, investigating a crime no one can remember, an internalized struggle with latent respectability politics, and featuring a special guest appearance from Édouard Glissant in the role that could have defined him. Appropriating the popular Agatha Christie’s Poirot detective novels, this work uses a well-known format to tell a not-so-well known history, while satirising the current trend for tokenistic casting practices.

2:05pm & 5:10pm
Morgan Quaintance, Surviving You, Always (2020), 18 mins

In Surviving You, Always, a narrative opposition between the proposed metaphysical highs of psychedelic drugs and the harsher actualities of concrete metropolitan life, sets up a formal and conceptual study in contrasts. These two realities also form the backdrop of an adolescent encounter told through still images and written narration. Voice-overs by American psychologist Timothy Leary and spiritualist Ram Dass, profess that psychedelic drugs trigger the expansion of consciousness. Simultaneously, on screen text tells us of Quaintance’s own experience as a teenager in 1990s South London, whose acid-infused journeys revealed the city’s built environment to be a nightmarish and alienating scene for the dissolution of self. Following both perspectives simultaneously is a mind-twisting exercise, but Quaintance’s seamless editing, confessional candour and compelling sound design reveal a hidden history of working class multicultural life in London that burns with multiple socio-political resonances, and a deep sense of urban melancholy.

2:23pm & 5:28pm
Jamie Crewe, False Wife (2022), 15 mins

False Wife is a work that leads its visitors through an ordeal of transformation. A poppers training video is typically a user-made compilation of pornographic clips, uploaded to adult video hosting sites. These clips are paired with text, hypnotic music, voiceovers, and instructions for action. Viewers are told to masturbate and sniff poppers, to let imagery and sensation meld, and reach a gooning ecstatic fervour.

False Wife is a poppers training video, but its material is obscure. Its narrative is drawn from a variety of folk tales in which transformation occurs, and relationships happen. Its footage is scavenged from sources that reflect these themes, reduced to slivers of significant imagery, rubbed together. These originating sources are warped or inflamed to say ambiguous things: to discuss desire, shame, transgression, and the longing for change, and the various ways we want — and don’t want — to face them.

2.10 – 3.45 pm – Zilkha Auditorium 

2.10 – 2.40pm: In the darkened auditorium, a recording of Derek Jarman reading the first half of his only work of prose fiction, Through The Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping. The text, accompanied by the complete audio recording, is published for the first time ever this month and is available in the gallery bookshop. Further information is available here.

2.40pm – 3.45pm:

Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature (2022, 38 mins)

A filmed wander through the John Hansard Gallery exhibition, 2021-2, with Howard Sooley, Amanda Wikiinson & James MacKay. It is directed by writer, presenter and curator Philip Hoare, who co-curated the exhibitions and is produced by John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. Further information is available here and here.

Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them (2021, 13 mins 35 secs)

In an honouring of Derek Jarman’s openness and vision, this work explores Derek Jarman’s legacy to question the world we inhabit today and to ask how we flourish even in a hostile environment. It is directed by artist film-maker Sarah Wood, and premiered in the John Hansard Gallery exhibition. Further information is available here.

A New Journey to Avebury (2022, 11 mins)
A tourist’s shot-by-shot homage to and recreation of Derek Jarman’s incidental travel film, A Journey to Avebury, made 50 years on from the original by artist and curator Stanley Schtinter, with research by James Norton and a new, original soundtrack by Nkisi. Further information is available here and here.

Jamie Crewe is a beautiful bronze figure with a polished cocotte’s head. She makes artworks with video, text, installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, and more. These works think about constriction: the way people are formed by their cultures, environments and relationships; and the things that herniate from them as a consequence.

Jamie is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam University and Glasgow School of Art. They have had a number of solo exhibitions, including at Gasworks (London), Tramway (Glasgow), and Grand Union (Birmingham). Their work has also been presented in group exhibitions such as Glasgow International Festival Director’s Programme and I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). Jamie was the recipient of the tenth Margaret Tait Award, Scotland’s most prestigious moving image prize for artists, and the resultant work, Ashley, was premiered at Glasgow Film Festival in March 2020.

Onyeka Igwe is an artist filmmaker who describes her practice as “a way of doing politics”. In her work, she navigates the dissonance, reflection and amplification of contrasting forces – the voice and the body, narration and text, sound and the archive. Describing her films as structural “figure-of-eights” that expose the multiplicity of narratives, Igwe seeks to disentangle this complex web of material in order to understand and document how we can live together.

Onyeka’s video works have been screened at Camden Arts Centre (London), Dak’art OFF (Senegal) and Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh) and at film festivals internationally including European Media Arts Festival (Germany), London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival (Canada) and the Smithsonian African American film festival (USA). Solo exhibitions include The High Line (New York), Mercer Union (Toronto), LUX (London) and Jerwood Arts (London). She was awarded the Foundwork Artist Prize (2021) and the Berwick New Cinema Award (2019).

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Her art and activism is inspired by alternative communities, spirituality and lifestyles. Through her moving image practice, Ndiritu proposes a type of expanded cinema that allows the public to witness and access non-rational states through the creation of art and cinema; as a way of changing their perspective on difficult subjects such as the environment, immigration and indigenous rights.

Grace’s work is housed in museum collections such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The British Council, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Modern Art Museum Warsaw. Recent exhibitions include the British Art Show (2021/2022), Kunsthal Gent (2021) and Nottingham Contemporary (2021). Her debut short film Black Beauty (2021) was screened at 72nd Berlinale Film Festival (2022), FID Marseille (2021) and 16th Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival (2021). Upcoming exhibitions include a mid-career survey at SMAK, Ghent, Belgium in 2023.

Morgan Quaintance’s moving image practice largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes in order to remain responsive and open to emerging interests, current affairs and historical events. His work encompasses a variety of forms including music, text, photography and curation, with film being the overarching container and expressive conduit for each.

Morgan’s moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including MoMA (New York), McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (San Francisco), Konsthall C (Sweden), David Dale (Glasgow), European Media Art Festival (Germany), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Scotland), Images Festival (Toronto), International Film Festival Rotterdam and Third Horizon Film Festival (Miami). He is the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, the 2021 Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista in Spain, and the 2021 UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London.

Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary artist working towards radical self-love, inspired by Black feminist practice and writing. Through performance, writing and multi-media installation, she explores places, objects and celebrities in British popular culture, and their effects on self-formation. In her practice, Uddoh uses humour, appropriation and parody (historically used by diasporic subjects for resistance). Her artworks often recontextualise popular media formats and materials, to pull on memories widely shared by a British public, as a gesture towards taking ownership of mass-media.

Rosa’s solo exhibitions include Stuart Hall Library (London), Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool), Focal Point Gallery (Southend-on-Sea) and Destiny’s Atelier (Oslo). Group shows include Workplace Gallery (London), Pioneer Works (New York), 68 Institute (Copenhagen) and EXILE (Vienna). Her work is in collections including the Arts Council Collection. She won the Artquest Peer Forum Award at Camden Arts Centre, received a Sarabande: Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation Scholarship – selected by Nick Night (OBE) and is a New Contemporaries Artist.

Alberta Whittle’s practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. Her work is often made in response to current events and draws on her research into the African diaspora and the decolonisation of Western histories, with major themes including refusal, race, xenophobia and climate catastrophe.

Alberta was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. She is Margaret Tait Award winner (2018/9). Alberta has exhibited and performed in various solo and group shows including Gothenburg Biennale, Lisson Gallery (London), Liverpool Biennial, Art Night London, British Art Show, Glasgow International Festival, Eastside Projects (Birmingham), GoMA (Glasgow), the National Galleries of Scotland, 13th Havana Biennale (Cuba), The Showroom (London) and the Apartheid Museum (Johannesburg). Her work has been acquired for the UK National Collections, The Scottish National Gallery Collections, Glasgow Museums Collections and The Contemporary Art Research Collection at Edinburgh College of Art.

Céline Condorelli (IT, FR, UK) is a London and Lisbon-based artist, and was one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK; she is the author and editor of Support Structures published by Sternberg Press (2009).

Condorelli combines a number of approaches from developing structures for ‘supporting’ (the work of others, forms of political imaginary, existing and fictional realities) to broader enquiries into forms of commonality and discursive sites.

Recent exhibitions include After Work, Talbot Rice Gallery, and South London Gallery, UK (2022), Our Silver City 2094, Nottingham Contemporary, UK, Work, work, work (work), Muzeum Sztuki, Poland, Two Years’ Vacation, TEA, Spain (2021) and FRAC Lorraine, France (2020), Céline Condorelli, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Switzerland, Equipment, Significant Other, Austria, Host/Vœrt, Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, Ausstellungsliege, Albertinum, Germany (2019), Zanzibar, the Kings Cross Project, UK and exhibition at Vera Cortes, Portugal (2018), Proposals for a Qualitative Society (spinning), Stroom Den Haag, Netherlands, Corps à Corps, IMA Brisbane, Australia, including a sculpture garden which won Australian Institute of Architects Art and Architecture Prize (2017), Gwangju Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Sydney Biennial, and Concrete Distractions, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Portugal (2016), bau bau, HangarBicocca, Italy (2015), Céline Condorelli, Chisenhale Gallery, UK, Positions, Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands. Her monograph, bau bau was published by Mousse in 2017.

Dr Jareh Das is a Researcher, Writer, Independent Curator and (occasional) Florist who lives and works between West Africa/the UK. Her interests in (global) modern and contemporary art are cross-disciplinary, although her understanding is filtered through the lens of performance art which informs both her academic and curatorial work.

In 2022, Das was awarded a two-year early career fellowship from Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art as part of their New Narratives Awards. She holds a doctorate in Curating Art and Science: New Methods and Sites of Production and Display in partnership with Arts Catalyst and Royal Holloway, the University of London funded by Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC); an MA in Curating Contemporary Art (Inspire), the Royal College of Art, London funded by Arts Council England (ACE); and a BA (Hons) in Material Culture, Architecture and Museum Studies from the University of Leeds. Previous curatorial and editorial roles include Camden Art Centre (2021), MVRDV, Rotterdam (2016-2018), Arts Catalyst, London (2013-2016), Etemad Gallery, Dubai (2011-2012) and MIMA Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2009-2011).

Lola Olufemi is co-author of ‘A FLY Girl’s Guide to University’ (Verve Poetry Press, 2019), author of ‘Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power’ (Pluto Press, 2019) and ‘Experiments in Imagining Otherwise’ (Hajar Press, 2021). She is a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective and the recipient of the 2020 Techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership between The Stuart Hall Foundation, CREAM and Westminster School of Arts. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination, its relationship to futurity, political demands and imaginative-revolutionary potential. Her short story, “Red” was shortlisted for the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing prize. She tweets at @lolaolufemi_ and is represented by Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander Associates. Alongside writing, she facilitates reading groups/workshops, occasionally curates and is volunteer co-ordinator at the Feminist Library.

Lisa Anderson is Managing Director of Black Cultural Archives (BCA), London. BCA is the only national heritage centre dedicated to collecting, preserving, and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain. BCA grew from a community response to the New Cross Massacre (1981), the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984); underachievement of Black children in British schools, the failings of the Race Relations Act 1976, and the negative impacts of racism against, and a lack of popular recognition of, and representation by people of African and Caribbean descent in the UK.

The Jarman Award is presented in association with Whitechapel Gallery.

The Jarman Award 2022

The Film London Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of UK-based artist filmmakers.The Award is inspired by visionary filmmakerDerek Jarman and is presented in association with Whitechapel Gallery. Now in its fifteenth year, the Award has built an enviable reputation for spotting rising stars of the UK art world. Previously shortlisted artists include Heather Phillipson, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oreet Ashery, Duncan Campbell, Monster Chetwynd, LukeFowler, ImranPerretta, Charlotte Prodger, Laure Prouvost, Elizabeth Price, James Richards, and Project Art Works, all of whom went on to be shortlisted for or to win the Turner Prize.