LYRICS FULL OF CULTURE

LYRICS FULL OF CULTURE

Film screening curated by Andrew Pierre Hart  

5th March 2022  5 – 7pm 

As part of the public programme for ICF’s Diaspora Pavilion 2: London, exhibiting artist Andrew Pierre Hart presented a one-day screening event.

Lyrics full of culture featured a selection of films by young artists and filmmakers who share, experience and respond through the medium of film and video. Hart selected these works because they offer insight into a generation whose film philosophies are shaped by a centre and speak in different ways to a wider idea of Brixton, London or city living.

David Lisbon (UK)
produce & labor, 2021
This work is a part of a new body of tomato related works whose research started in 2021. The tomato acts as an entry point for conversations that Lisbon hopes to have about the hyperobject¹ that is labor inequity. Objects like televisions, luxury cars, and even mattresses could be other interesting entry points. However, there is something specifically important about the literal consumption of produce. The tomato is an ‘essential worker’ in many dishes and households across the world, making it the perfect companion for thinking through these issues.

In produce & labor Lisbon ‘samples’ an excerpt from ‘Maurice Bishop Speaks to U.S. Working People’ delivered on June 5ht 1983 at Hunter College in New York City. This message about the widening gap of inequity as a result of capitalism fits well against the backdrop of constant industrial tomato production footage from Florida in 2014. Lisbon’s composition aims to be a prophetic warning akin to contemporary works like An Inconvenient Truth(2006), Supersize Me(2004), or even Orwell’s 1984.

Steloolive (Ghana)
NiKANiKA Robotics, 2020
NiKANiKA Robotics appropriates the design of the multifunctional milling machine for pulverizing grains such as corn, rice, etc. and reimagines it as an experimental ‘listening booth’ with aural and acoustic implications for spectatorship. Steloolive attempts to simplify the digital sound and music creation that often requires technological materials and skills. This installation becomes a minimal sculpture into which the viewer can access field recordings documenting narratives and sounds from various communities in Ghana.

Emily Downe (UK)
Spinning Record, 2017
Whilst a human figure walks a linear path, the rest of existence continues turning on an endless loop. Diagrams and sounds from NASA’s Golden Record communicate information about life on Earth; seeing everything that exists from an outside perspective.

Hongrui Liu (Hong Kong)
Dialogue with Aeolus, 2021
Hongrui Liu is an artist and researcher currently partaking in a Contemporary Art Practice Masters Programme in the Royal College of Arts. In an attempt to capture the everyday and as an ode to cinema verite spawns this free film. Jonas Mekas once said: In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colours and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life. Instead of thinking of cinema as a mausoleum, perhaps it’s better to consider it as a cryonic chamber. Somewhere special where memories and experiences live and await to be activated. This film is about passage. It’s about existing somewhere along the edges. It’s about light and shadow. Directions and misdirections. Our life consists of the human, the machine and nature. I wanted to celebrate this unique relation that we all share and situate in. something we are all entitled to as human beings. Hence the film is a song for The very land around us, the material of life, something that we take for granted at times. I included poems that I made that celebrate life. Despite the hopelessness we sometimes inevitably feel, there is beauty in the world still. The wind carries on and the sea keeps unraveling.

Kirtis Clarke (Netherlands)
Lifetimes Lived Apart, 2021
A visual essay exploring ideas surrounding the black encounter; where gesture, in close proximity to others plays an important role in community solidification, functioning to unify (Black) diasporia communities irrespective of time or place. Lifetimes Lived Apart begins with a research into where the artist was able identify blackness in the relational gestures, verbal and non verbal communications present in his every day. From the nod to calling aunty, aunty – this vocabulary of utterances, codes and gestures are performative identifiers of a global and ever-present black vernacular. Existing alongside a large-scale sculptural triptych under the same project title, this moving image piece has featured at Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven and HOME x Saint Ogun 1 Year Anniversary Exhibition, London.