Zinzi Minott
Zinzi Minott is an artist and dancer whose work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies and politics. She explores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender and class and is specifically interested in the place of Black women’s body within the form. As a dancer and filmmaker, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance, seeing her live performances, filmic explorations and objects as different but connected manifestations of dance and body based outcomes and enquiry. Broken narratives, disturbed lineages and glitches are used by Minott to explore notions of racism one experiences through the span of a Black life. Sharing Caribbean stories in her work, she highlights the histories of those enslaved and the resulting migration of the Windrush Generation. Current commissions and residences are with BFMAF, Spike Island (Bristol), Transmission (Glasgow), 198 Gallery and Cubitt Gallery (London). In 2016–17, she was artist-in-residence at both Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Zinzi has also been an artist-in-residence at Serpentine Gallery, Rich Mix and Dance Research Space, and is currently a resident artist at Somerset House and Once Dance UK Trailblazer. Zinzi is one of two artists commissioned under ‘CONTINUOUS’, a four-year partnership between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead) and Siobhan Davies Dance to explore the relationship between contemporary dance and the visual arts.
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Akingbade’s trilogy of films act as an ode to her cinematic project on social housing, tied together through an interweaving of archive, fiction, 16mm film, digital, activism and dreams.
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In consultation with Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets, a second work was chosen to accompany At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance. Taking the opportunity given by an online Festival, it was felt that this strategy might better simulate the artists’ performance, installation and exhibition making practice for viewers.
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Artist and filmmaker Kat Anderson presents the world festival premiere of ‘Restraint Restrained’. The programme features two films from Anderson’s first solo exhibition. The works draw on the experiences and narratives of the many mentally ill Black people who have met their deaths in police custody or mental health facilities, through excessive restraint holds and other violent and negligent behaviours. ‘Restraint Restrained’ references the central premise of Frantz Fanon’s essay ‘Concerning Violence’, in which he claims that in order for the decolonisation of indigenous land to happen, a total and violent purging of the colonisers by the indigenous people must occur. Anderson repurposes this idea to consider how the contemporary Black mind and body, as a ‘colonised space’, is processed through public health and police institutions; understanding such authorities as embodiments and enforcers of structural white supremacy.
‘Restraint Restrained’ was commissioned by Block336 and Black Cultural Archives and supported by Arts Council England, Elephant Trust, LUX and Spike Island.
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For this year’s Propositions strand, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is dedicating a focus to the diverse practice of Hong Kong writer, artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia. Though the centre of this presentation is Never Rest/Unrest, Sia’s directorial debut and an urgent work that functions as creative reportage of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the full range of work on view includes writing, collage and performance documentation, as well as a livestream discussion with Sia.
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The Great Indomitable Circus prepares the premiere of their new performance ‘Rights of Man’. Setting up tent in a sleepy northern Spanish town, they devise changes in the style of their show. But their days become mired in meandering vaudevillian arguments, analysing the grandeur of the landscape, the simplicity of the native architecture or the quality of each other’s performances. After much back-and-forth, they end up sticking to their original script.
Introduction by filmmaker Juan Rodrigañez
The film will be preceded by the 2019 Berwick New Cinema Competition award presentation
The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun follows Sili, a girl traversing Dakar’s many obstacles with her crutches. After starting to work as a newspaper vendor, she quickly runs afoul of territorial boys who see her as a competitor. Djibril Diop Mambéty’s final film is handled with gentle lightness and grace, providing incontrovertible evidence of his place not only as a master of African cinema, but as a pivotal figure in the history of cinema. — Herb Shellenberger