SCORCHING SUNS, RISING SEAS: FILM PROGRAMME

Part of Scorching Suns, Rising Seas, an environmental-justice programme curated by Radical Ecology and presented in partnership with Serpentine’s Back to Earth project, LIFT 2022 and We Are Lewisham.

Saturdays & Sundays, 25-26 June; 2-3 July; 9-10 July, 12-5:30pm, The Albany, Lewisham. Free, no booking required.

Maria Thereza Alves (Brazil, 1961) has participated in the Toronto Biennale, Manifesta 12 and 7, the 32nd and 29th São Paulo Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale and in dOCUMENTA (13). She has had a solo exhibit at MUAC in Mexico City and a survey exhibit at CAAC in Seville. Alves will be participating in the upcoming Sydney Biennale. Alves is the recipient of the Vera List Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018. In 1978, as a member of the International Indian Treaty Council, Alves made an official presentation of human rights abuses of the indigenous population of Brazil at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Alves was one of the founding members of the Green Party of Sao Paulo in 1987. Her book, Recipes for Survival has recently been published by University of Texas Press.

Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, video, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues. She has held residencies at the DAAD in Berlin and The Huntington in San Marino; received funding from Creative Capital and Prince Claus Fund; participated in the Chicago Architecture, Sao Paulo, Venice, Berlin, and Whitney Biennials; recent solo shows include ICA Boston and MCA Chicago. She is a 2020-2022 Inaugural Borderlands Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University, and Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School.

David de Rozas (b. 1979) is a multidisciplinary artist and award-winning filmmaker whose practice merges experimental documentary and contemporary art forms, revisiting and relocating the politics of memory. De Rozas films have been screened in festivals and film curated series worldwide, such as Visions du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False, and Kassel DocFest. His recent film ‘GIVE’ was nationally broadcasted on POV, and won Best Short Documentary at FullFrame and Best Experimental at the Smithsonian African American Film Festival. He is a 2021 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Manthia Diawara (born1953) is a writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar and art historian. Diawara holds the title of University Professor at New York University, where he is Director of the Institute of African American Affairs. Much of Diawara’s research has been in the field of Black cultural studies. Diawara has contributed significantly to the study of Black film. In 1992, Indiana University Press published his African Cinema: Politics & Culture and in 1993, Routledge published a volume he edited, titled Black American Cinema. A filmmaker himself, Diawara has written and directed a number of films. His 1998 book In Search of Africa is an account of his return to his childhood home of Guinea and was published by Harvard University Press. Diawara is a founding editor of Black Renaissance Noire, a journal of arts, culture and politics dedicated to work that engages contemporary Black concerns.

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists, to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organisations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence. FA’s investigations employ cutting edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open source investigation, digital modelling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and academic collaboration. Findings from our investigations have been presented in national and international courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, cultural institutions, international media, as well as in citizen’s tribunals and community assemblies.

Sky Hopinka (b.1984, United States) is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. Working as a filmmaker, teacher, curator and artist, his practice explores the place of myth in a contemporary Indigenous world. maɬni is presented as part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project.

Karrabing Film Collective is an Indigenous media group who use filmmaking to interrogate the conditions of inequality for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and retain connections to land and their ancestors. Composed of some thirty extended family members whose ancestral lands stretch across saltwaters and inlands and the Italian Alps, Karrabing together create films using an “improvisational realism” that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Night Time Go is presented as part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project.

Tabita Rezaire is infinity longing to experience itself in human form. Her path as an artist, devotee, yogi, doula, and soon to be farmer is all geared towards manifesting the divine in herself and beyond. Embracing digital, corporeal and ancestral memory, she digs into scientific imaginaries and mystical realms to tackle the colonial wounds and energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Rezaire’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality merge as fertile ground to nourish visions for connection and emancipation. Through screen interfaces and healing circles, her offerings aim to nurture our collective growth and expand our capacity for togetherness. The artist is based near Cayenne in French Guiana, where she is currently studying Agriculture and birthing AMAKABA – her vision for collective healing in the Amazonian forest. Her offerings have been shared widely – Centre Pompidou, Paris; MASP, São Paulo; Serpentine, London; MoMa, NY; New Museum, NY; Gropius Bau, Berlin; MMOMA, Moscow; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; ICA London; V&A London; National Gallery Denmark; The Broad LA; MoCADA, NY; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, Paris – and presented for international biennales in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Kochi, Athens, and Berlin. Sorry for Real is presented as part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project.

Sumayya Vally is the Founder and Principal of the interdisciplinary research and architecture studio, Counterspace. Her design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is in love with Johannesburg. It serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. Vally is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1. Ingesting Architectures was presented in 2020 as part of The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, a General Ecology project event at Serpentine, London.