Still from, Ja’Tovia Gary, Quiet As It’s Kept, 2023.
£10/£5 members & concessions
Join us for a screening of two films by Ja’Tovia Gary, programmed by A Month of Single Frames.
PROGRAMME
Quiet As It’s Kept, 2023, (26min) is a contemporary cinematic response to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970. Set in Ohio in 1941, the book is an evocative illustration of the everyday particulars of colorism and its ravaging effects on the intramural. Themes of embodiment, psychoanalysis, and beauty are explored in both the source text and the answering film. Instinctual and eviscerating, the film encourages viewers to make meaning that is rooted in the subjective and examine their position within looking relations.
The film is an intimate collage of vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original super 8 and 16mm film footage, and documentary conventions. Meditating on the gaze and Black women’s particular embodied realities, Gary also re-contextualizes contemporary social media footage. Creating conceptual links for each viral clip to a character, event, or thematic element from Morrison’s story, the film emphasizes questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture.
The Giverny Document, 2019, (single channel, 42min) is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women, filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France. Through audacious formal experimentation, filmmaker and artist Ja’Tovia Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, vox populi, and montage editing to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance while interrogating the histories of those bodies and lives as spaces of forced labor and commodified production.
Content Warning: These films contains depictions and discussions of trauma, grief, and police violence
ABOUT SOUTH BY SOUTH
South by South is a quarterly film screening at the South London Gallery. This programme focuses on presenting cinema from Africa and the diaspora to audiences in the UK.
ABOUT A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES
A Month of Single Frames is a film collective dedicated to bringing artists’ moving image into conversation through film programming, an annual journal and artist moving image production.
Taking its name from Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer’s collaborative film, the nature of our programming reflects their ethos as filmmakers by screening artists’ works together for double-bill screenings, exploring a range of contemporary social, political, and environmental themes. We aim to introduce artists’ moving image and experimental cinema to audiences who may not have encountered work of this kind before. By pairing films, one short with one midlength/feature, we aim to draw out connections between the works and bring the artists into dialogue with one another, highlighting the and inherently collective nature of artist filmmaking.
A Month of Single Frames is committed to expanding access to artists’ moving image and experimental cinema, introducing this work to audiences who may not yet have encountered it.
The collective is led by Ufuoma Essi, Sam Williams, and Tendai Mutambu. South by South will be curated by Ufuoma Essi.
ABOUT UFUOMA ESSI
Ufuoma Essi is an artist and filmmaker born and based in South East London.
ACCESS
- Films will be subtitled.
- Wheelchair Access and Accessible Toilets are available at this site.
- Seating will be available
- This space will be low lit during the screenings.
- Please contact mail@southlondongallery.org with any further access requirements.