Nevermind (Screen Test I)

Atiéna

12.12.2020
Saturday 12th December 2020
10am-6pm
 
 
Cell Project Space presents a new commission by Frankfurt-based artist Atiéna, the sixth and final in a series of projects as part of the pilot launch of Cellular, an experimental Live Art and Media-based programme. For this commission, Atiéna has produced a new work that will be displayed offsite on a moving billboard driving through locations neighbouring Cell Project Space.
 
Nevermind (Screen Test I) is neither a portrait photograph nor a movie. As a screen test, it is conceived to interrogate the suitability and sustainability of its very production. Reproducing some of the techniques employed in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1963 – 1966), Atiéna presents a work consisting of a model posing, still, against a stark white backdrop. Slowed down to the point of becoming quasi stationary, the work speaks of a stark ‘silence’ and mute ventriloquism intrinsic to commercial fashion imagery. Styled by the artist, the model’s clothing and make up play with iconographic gestures invoking popular notions of transgression specific to teenage popular music and in doing so, simultaneously blend emancipation with commercialisation; and nihilism with nostalgia.
 
Nevermind (Screen Test I) will move across East London for an 8-hour period throughout the day, pausing at various locations for 72-minute intervals. Details with a time schedule will be published on a downloadable PDF map to be distributed prior to the event.
 
34:51min (looped)
Director and Editor: Atiéna
Co-Director and Colour Editor: Dudu Quintanilha
Casting: Mischa Notcutt (11c)
Model: Valerie Mevegue
Make Up Artist: Naomi Gugler
 

Atiéna (b. France, 1990), formally known as Atiéna Lansade Riollet, is currently based in Frankfurt, Germany. She first exhibited works in the group exhibition 'No,No,No,No,No' at Cell Project Space in 2018 and is currently working on her forthcoming solo exhibition at the gallery to open in November 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include 'The Cycle of Three Tails', Zaza, Naples in 2019; Shanaynay, Paris; and 'Postures of 'Aliennation', Almanac, Turin (both in 2018). Selected group exhibitions in 2019 include 'Milk', Edouart Montassut, Paris; 'Cinders, Sinuous and Supple', curated by Deborah Joyce Holman for Les Urbaines, Espace Arlaud, Lausanne and 'Le Colt est Jeune & Haine', curated by Cédric Fauq, Doc, Paris.
 
Launched in June 2020, Cellular is a new experimental Live Art and Media-based programme comprising a multi-purpose ground floor event space at Cell Project Space and an online platform on Cell’s website. Originally conceived to run alongside the exhibitions programme at the gallery, Cellular launches six pilot commissions of on-site and digital works to be delivered with and without physical audiences between June - December 2020. To find out more, please click here.
 
 
 
Cellular is made possible with the generous support of an Emergency Grant by Arts Council England. Atiéna's commission has been further supported by Fluxus Art Projects. 
   Fluxus
 

Hotel Partner: MAMA Shelter London

  
 
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Under the Railway Arch, West Street, London, E2 9NQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Under the Railway Arch, West Street, London, E2 9NQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Under the Railway Arch, West Street, London, E2 9NQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Under the Railway Arch, West Street, London, E2 9NQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Beauvoir Rd, London, N1 5SQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Beauvoir Rd, London, N1 5SQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Beauvoir Rd, London, N1 5SQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Beauvoir Rd, London, N1 5SQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Beauvoir Rd, London, N1 5SQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Rose Lipman Building, 43 De Beauvoir Rd, London, N1 5SQ
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Kingsland Road, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Kingsland Road, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Kingsland Road, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Kingsland Road, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, TFC Dalston Supermarket, Ridley Road, London, E8 2NH
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, TFC Dalston Supermarket, Ridley Road, London, E8 2NH
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, TFC Dalston Supermarket, Ridley Road, London, E8 2NH
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, TFC Dalston Supermarket, Ridley Road, London, E8 2NH
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, The Oval, E2 9DT, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, The Oval, E2 9DT, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, The Oval, E2 9DT, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, The Oval, E2 9DT, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, The Oval, E2 9DT, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, The Oval, E2 9DT, London
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Cell Project Space Carpark, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9DA
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Cell Project Space Carpark, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9DA
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Cell Project Space Carpark, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9DA
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Cell Project Space Carpark, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9DA
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Cell Project Space Carpark, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9DA
Nevermind (Screen Test 1), 2020, Cell Project Space Carpark, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9DA

A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me

Renée Akitelek Mboya

04.12.2021 — 19.12.2021
12 January 2022, 48-hour Online Screening
A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me
Starts 10am on Cell’s homepage
 
Screening & Reading Room presentation
4th–19th December 2021
Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm
 
Curator Adomas Narkevičius
 
A Screening event with interlocution by Kara Blackmore took place on Saturday 4th December 3pm
 
A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me is the first solo presentation of the work of Kenyan filmmaker, writer and curator Renée Akitelek Mboya in the UK. Upon the artist’s invitation, curator and academic Kara Blackmore will inaugurate the event in the form of introduction to Mboya's film on the opening day of the three-week-long screening as well as mediate the work through discursive audio and textual materials throughout normal opening hours.
 
The eponymously-titled short film A Glossary Of Words My Mother Never Taught Me follows the heritage of the 1966 film Africa Addio (also known as Africa Blood & Guts in the United States, and Africa Farewell in the United Kingdom). Africa Addio is a sensationalist Italian documentary about the end of the colonial era in Africa, shot over a period of three years by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, who had gained fame as the directors of Mondo Cane in 1962. This film ensured the viability of the so-called Mondo film genre, a cycle of “shockumentaries” — a description that largely characterizes Africa Addio. In appropriating the form and material of Africa Addio, Mboya subverts the film’s material to articulate the forensic function of image as evidence of the racist regime that portrays certain bodies as criminal, or worse.
 
In A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, the artist’s voice superimposes an element of autobiographical narration over the pseudo-documentary Mondo footage. Unfolding memories of a more recent past suggest that Kenya’s political independence from British colonial rule as a historical fact in itself did not entail a disappearance of the inherited forms of oppression from the country’s public domain. In building the independent post-colonial nation, generations of political regimes have keenly constructed official versions of history – in Kenya and beyond – haunted by the parts of the past it suppresses. A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me traces this internal impulse to efface the memory of colonial injustices as it exposes friction between decolonisation as historical emancipation of nation-states and the colonial matrix of power that continues to permeate the psychosocial fabric of the present. 
 
Alongside the film, to interlocute in the violent history its imagery evidences, Renée Akitelek Mboya reimagines a songbook of 1960s and 1970s ideological ‘freedom’ songs as part of a nation-building tool kit, presented alongside an audio-conversation between the artist and academic Kara Blackmore as well as reading companions offering methodological inroads into the ongoing operations of coloniality.
 
Kara Blackmore In Conversation With Renée Akitelek Mboya:
 
 
Renée Akitelek Mboya is a writer, curator and filmmaker working between Dakar and Nairobi and is collaborative editor and member of the Wali Chafu Collective, Nairobi, KE.  Her custom is one that relies on biography and storytelling as a form of research and production.
 
Kara Blackmore is a curator and academic who works at the intersections of art, heritage, and social repair after conflict. She has curated exhibitions across the globe, including in Uganda, South Africa and the UK and her writing is published widely including the Journal of Refugee Studies, Wasafiri, Critical Arts, Biennial Foundation Magazine, C& and Art Africa Magazine.
 
Made possible with generous support from Arts Council England Project Grant and the Cultural Recovery Fund.
 
 
 
 
COVID SAFETY: The presentation takes place inside the gallery's ground floor event space and reading room. Following new current government guidance, visitors are required to wear a protective face mask indoors. Please do not attend the gallery if you; believe you may be infected with COVID-19; have experienced symptoms in the last 10 days or have been instructed to self-isolate.
 
For full details about access follow the link here. If you have any additional access needs please contact us at office@cellprojects.org. 
 
 

Related press

Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Reading Room View, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Reading Room View, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Reading Room, detail, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Reading Room, detail, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Reading Room View, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Reading Room View, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Songbook, Installation View, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Songbook, Installation View, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Songbook, Installation View, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Songbook, Installation View, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Songbook, Detail, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Songbook, Detail, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Songbook, Detail, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, Songbook, Detail, 2021
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.
Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2020. HD digital video, 14:40.

Permit to Dream: Sight Method

Yaa Yeboah-Newton

Our Naked Truths, Life Drawing Workshop

06.06.2024
Thursday 6 June, 6.30pm to 8.30pm
Life Drawing and Conversation Session led by Yaa Yeboah-Newton
 
Permit to Dream: Sight Method is prompted by the question of urgent dreaming, and inspired by Coumba Samba’s Capital solo exhibition. Led by Yaa Yeboah-Newton, the workshop invited women and non-binary people of colour to take part in drawing and conversation as a continuation of her ongoing Our Naked Truths project. 
 
British-born Ghanaian creative healing practitioner and trainee integrative psychotherapist Yeboah-Newton guided participants to draw a live model posed against a landscaped earth mound. The participants gathered after hours within the exhibition space to render loose, charcoal drawings of a dancer positioned on top of the remnants of Samba’s FIFA; now dry soil gathered in a mound on the floor. The dancer’s movements and physical positioning traced the memory of École Des Sables’ choreography. Documentation of these re-imagined movements now exist as drawings. 
 
Yaa Yeboah-Newton (Yaa Sankofa, she/her) is a British-born Ghanaian woman navigating the diaspora. Yeboah-Newton works as a Founder of Our Naked Truths and the Black Women’s Therapy Fund, Space Holder and Facilitator, Creative Healing Practitioner, and Trainee Integrative Psychotherapist. Her practice is a creative, embodied, intersectional, facilitative approach. Empowering people to have an honest, reflective, healing and celebratory exploration of self-acceptance, identity, forgiveness, freedom, and love.
 
Using sound, art, meditation, discussion, writing and body wisdom as tools. Yeboah-Newton has facilitated groups and 1-2-1 sessions with Family Tree and ...cake theatre cast and production teams, Black Girl Fest,  gal-dem, Soho House, Ogilvy Roots, Exist Loudly, The South Bank and Festival Republik - Kenya to name a few. She is the lead facilitator for all Our Naked Truths sessions. She founded Our Naked Truths to create a safe space for empowerment, healing and reclamation. Centering the stories and bodies of women and non-binary people in the name of self-acceptance. A mission that is very dear to her heart and a realised purpose.
 
Permit to Dream is generously supported by Tower Hamlets Community Fund, Cell Project Space Trainee Fellows are supported by Art Fund.
 
 

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