Thursday 5th July 2018  8:00 PM

Hieroglyphics of the Flesh attempts to think through violence, negation and colonial histories at the level of the haptic, bodily and material. It is framed around artist and writer Ayesha Hameed?s conceptualisation of the notion of ?hapticality?, which brings a sense of the sensory and visceral back to post-colonial discourses to propose new ways of feeling through others: from the sense of skin pressed on skin in the belly of a slave ship to the evocation of queer masculinity and the politics of the gendered body. The films in this programme variously signal to how the legacies of slavery and colonialism have been metabolised and articulated through the body, as well as externalised on dancefloors and through soundsystems.

Programme:

Maud Sulter, Plantation, 1995. Video, 8 min.
Camara Taylor, How to Limbo, 2016. Audio, 3 min.
Keith Piper, Go West Young Man, 1996. Video, 4 min.
Isaac Julien, Territories, 1984. 16mm transferred to HD, 25 min.
Ursula Mayer, Atom Spirit, 2016. 16mm transferred to HD, 20 min.

Total running time: 60 min

As part of the exhibition We Suffer to Remain at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (22 March ? 29 July 2018), LUX Scotland presents a film series that brings together a selection of artists? moving image work from Scotland, the UK and the greater African diaspora, with titles drawn from the LUX collection. We Suffer to Remain engages with the complex intersectional histories across Scotland and the Caribbean to make sense of the vestiges and trauma of slavery, and features work by Bahamian artists Sonia Farmer, Anina Major and John Beadle alongside Graham Fagen?s installation The Slave?s Lament (2015), commissioned by Hospitalfield for Scotland + Venice at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Traversing a deep history of transatlantic captivity, this four-part screening series places contemporary voices alongside more established positions in an attempt to map the pathology of colonisation and the subsequent consequences of decolonisation across generations. It examines forms of cultural transformation and deformation, politics of refusal and liberation, colonial legacies of exploitation and control, and the ongoing violence of these histories within both personal and collective experiences. The programmes feature work by artists including Ayo Akingbade, Ephraim Asili, Black Audio Film Collective, Helen Cammock, Louis Henderson, Isaac Julien, Ursula Mayer, Keith Piper, Camara Taylor, Alberta Whittle and others.

The project is curated by LUX Scotland Director Nicole Yip and is supported by the British Council.

Venue:
The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas
West St. & West Hill St., Nassau,
New Providence, Bahamas