Essay Film Festival 2021 Prelude 2: Future – World – EXV (Wilfred Ukpong, 2019)
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Organised in collaboration with Autograph ABP we share a recent film by artist Wilfred Ukpong and invite you to join us in conversation with the artist. We will share Future – World – EXV (2019) before holding a live discussion between Wilfred Ukpong, Karen Alexander and Mark Sealy.
The live conversation will begin at 18:00 here: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/b582a9071e7e4f4283aa543fbd8ca236
The film can be watched anytime before 23:30 on 12/03/2021 here: https://essayfilmfestival-screeningroom.com/Prelude-2-Wilfred-Ukpong
"Film & Photographic Cosmic Travellers such as Wilfred Ukpong call forth non-prescriptive, non-linear readings of the past, and demand that the kaleidoscopic condition of personal, cultural and national memory is forged into new and different jazz-like rhythmic formations. Ukpong’s visual world is a place of no one direction, no solid state, as in the realm of African Cosmologies, political memory functions and agitates within personal and political space, positioning both the audience and the maker not as subjects fixed in any given moment, but as active time-bending agents continuously engaged across different spaces, temporalities and universes.” (Mark Sealy, ABP)
Speaker Bios
Wilfred Ukpong is an interdisciplinary artist who incorporates a studio-based artistic practice with connective social engagement, tackling pertinent social issues with community participation and intervention. His long term project in the Niger-Delta, Blazing Century 1, received a special grant from the Prince Claus Fund and has been exhibited in international group shows in London, Lorient and the Hague. His film Future World won the Golden City Gates Excellence Award at ITB Berlin in 2018. The film has also been screened at Mash Johannesburg and David Krut Projects, as well as to the Senate of Nigeria in order to encourage a dialogue about environmental change in the Niger Delta. Ukpong is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford Brookes University, and he received his BA and Masters Degree from Ecole Supérieure d’Art Lorient, France.
Karen Alexander is a London-based independent film and moving image curator and an associate lecturer at Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London. For over 15 years she worked with and for BFI and the Royal College of Art. Her areas of research are artists’ film and video, and the post-colonial visual politics of the African diaspora with particular reference to gender, race and representation.
Recent curatorial projects include: A Passion for Remembering: The Films of Maureen Blackwood, Cinema Rediscovered, Bristol (2019), Dream Time: We All Have Stories, Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2018), Whip It Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind, Jeannette Elhers, Autograph, London (2015). She has written for numerous publications, most recently contributing to Artists' Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 (Paul Mellon Centre, 2019).
Mark Sealy MBE is a British curator and cultural historian with a special interest in the relationship of photography to social change, identity politics and human rights. In 1991 he became the director of Autograph ABP, the Association of Black Photographers, based since 2007 at Rivington Place, a purpose-built international visual arts centre in Shoreditch, London. He has curated several major international exhibitions and is also a lecturer.
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington