Legacies Of African Cinemas Opens In Lagos
By Mohammed Adekola
A three-day programme exploring the legacies of African cinemas has opened at the Guest Artists Space (G.A.S) Foundation, Lagos.
The exhibition is the end result of Art Exchange: Moving Image, a curatorial professional development programme organized by LUX, Yinka Shonibare Foundation and Guest Artists Space Foundation, with support from the British Council.
The multi-dimensional project featured physical installation, film projection and conversations, interrogates the coloniality embedded in archival moving images with specific focus on Cameroonian and the broader Global South cinemas.
Via experimental and archival film practices, the featured works looks at the residual and the spectral in the aftermath of colonial violence. They also question how histories are made visible, audible and thinkable through film. “The exhibition further draws on archival fragments and cultural residues such as music, gesture and choreography alongside the spectral recursions of radical cinematic movements once thought lost. These works challenge the fixedness of the archive, offering instead a space where the material and the memorial coexist in entanglement.
The works dissolve the lines between what can be seen and what is remembered, reworking cinema into spatio-temporal zone (un)folding, looping, and resistance to closure. They highlight gaps and absences not as ‘lack’ but as openings with the potential for speculation or re-memory,” reads the Y.S.F and G.A.S Foundation joint press release.
