Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire)

2019, Farah Al Qasimi

Set in the United Arab Emirates and inspired by the film genre of horror-comedy, Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire), playfully engages with colonial legacies and gendered expressions of identity. The work is presented as an episode of a fictional reality TV show starring a jinn (a spirit from Islamic religious culture, originating in pre-Islamic traditions) called Um Al Naar. She offers a critical perspective on colonial legacies and gender divisions in the Persian Gulf, blending popular spiritual beliefs with personal reflections. The artist has said that the jinn embodies ‘hysteria, curiosity, spirituality – a desire to be expressive and untethered.’

Gallery label, September 2024

Five Easy Pieces

1966–1969, Yvonne Rainer

Five Easy Pieces 1966–9 is a compilation of five black and white silent short films by the American choreographer, writer, dancer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer. Collectively they represent an important period of experimentation for the artist, during her transition from being a choreographer in the 1960s to a feature-length filmmaker in the 1970s. Rainer titled the collected short films as Five Easy Pieces to reflect the experimental nature of the works, what art historian Carrie Lambert has described as a ‘celluloid sketch-book ... but also complex and telling’ (Carrie Lambert, ‘Other Solutions’, leaflet accompanying Video Data Bank’s DVD A Woman Who…: Selected Works of Yvonne Rainer, Chicago 2005, p.1). The DVD comprises the following films:

Grass Breathing

c.1974, Ana Mendieta

Hands (For the Eye, the Hand of My Body Draws My Portrait)

1977, Geta Bratescu

Hands (For the Eye, the Hand of My Body Draws My Portrait) 1977 is a black and white silent film lasting 7 minutes and 30 seconds. The work exists in an edition of 5, of which this copy is number 2, and 2 artist’s proofs. It was originally shot on 8mm film and transferred to DVD more recently. The camera was operated by fellow Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu (born 1945), with whom Bratescu frequently collaborated. In the film the artist’s hands, filmed from her eye level, are performing various movements and activities above her drawing board. The sequence starts with her playing with different objects on the desk, holding a cigarette, removing a wedding ring. The artist subsequently switches to drawing lines on her palms with a black marker and finally tracing the contours of both her hands on a piece of paper.

So Much I Want to Say

1983, Mona Hatoum

Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon, Hatoum now lives and works in London. She often addresses themes of identity and exile in her work. In 1975, during what was mean to be a short visit to London, she became exiled when war broke out in Lebanon. Hatoum said this ‘created a kind of dislocation, [which] manifests itself in my work.’ This video consists of close-up still images of her face, with a pair of male hands covering her mouth which prevent her from speaking. Hatoum said ‘My work is about my experience of living in the West as a person from the Third World, about being an outsider, about occupying a marginal position, being excluded, being defined as “Other” or as one of “Them”.’

Gallery label, October 2022

Mother Tongue

2002, Zineb Sedira

In Mother Tongue the artist, her mother and her daughter try to exchange childhood memories in their native languages: French, Arabic and English. Sedira was born in Paris to Algerian parents, and moved to London to study art, where her daughter was born. The work reflects on storytelling as a way to preserve cultural identity across generations. It underscores the difficulty of maintaining a shared heritage across national and linguistic divides and acknowledges the complexity of identity.

Gallery label, May 2019

Paradise Omeros

2002, Sir Isaac Julien CBE RA

Paradise Omeros is a three-channel colour video installation with sound that examines the social and emotional terrain of postcolonial identity. Paradise Omeros is set in two locations: 1960s London and the Caribbean island of St Lucia, where both Julien’s parents were from. Its protagonist, Achille, appears in two time periods and locations: working as a waiter at a beach resort in contemporary Saint Lucia, and later wandering through brutalist buildings in 1960s London, the context in which Julien grew up.

Rebels of the Dance

2002, Fikret Atay

Fikret Atay born 1974 Rebels of the Dance 2002 Video installation Purchased with funds provided by the Frieze Art Fair Fund 2003 T11808

First Day of Spring

2005, Runa Islam

Kodak

2006, Tacita Dean CBE

Kodak 2006 documents the making of 16mm film stock inside a factory about to go out of business. Tacita Dean both celebrates the beauty of analogue filmmaking and mourns its demise. Today digital tools have almost completely replaced photochemical film equipment. Kodak was shot on 16mm film in one of the last places to make this type of film stock. It shows the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. Dean made the film just before the plant permanently stopped production. Photochemical film is produced in darkness. On the day of shooting, the factory was running a test, giving Dean a rare opportunity to capture it with the lights on. Long static shots show details of machinery and staff working or taking breaks. The hum of equipment can be heard in the background. A red ‘safelight’, used for working with light sensitive film, recurs throughout the film as well as in the entrance to the projection space. Dean has worked mainly with analogue film since the early 1990s. She believes digital technologies cannot replace its unique qualities. She especially values the surprises the material brings. Digital technology, Dean says, ‘neither breathes nor wobbles, but tidies up our society.’ Her work often explores disused structures and materials that once stood as visions of the future. Here Dean reflects on film itself as a technology on the brink of extinction. Since Dean made this film, Kodak have started producing small amounts of moving image film again. This is due in part to the artist’s campaign to save film.

Gallery label, January 2020

Whose Utopia?

2006, Cao Fei

Whose Utopia? is a colour video that is approximately twenty minutes long and is shown in a darkened room, projected onto a wall of two and a half square metres or larger. The film is set in a light bulb factory in China and consists of three parts. The first, titled ‘Imagination of Product’, begins with a series of close-ups showing light bulb components being produced and assembled by automated machines, followed by scenes of people working very quickly at workstations that are arranged into a grid formation. The second part, ‘Factory Fairytale’, shows individuals dancing and playing electric guitars inside the factory, often with staff working around them. Some of these performers wear labourers’ uniforms, but one is dressed in a ballerina’s outfit and another in a long white dress. This section of the film ends with footage of a woman going to bed, while the factory can be seen outside her window. The third part – ‘My Future is Not a Dream’ – shows individuals inside the factory, standing or sitting completely still and facing the camera, and in many of these scenes the operations of the factory continue around them. The film finishes with shots of people wearing white t-shirts bearing Cantonese characters that collectively spell out the phrase ‘My Future is Not a Dream’ (the English translation for which is provided using subtitles). The first two sections of the work are accompanied by ambient music including electronic sounds and bells, while the third part features a song that sounds like a kitsch version of American country music. This is performed in English by a man who sounds from his accent as if he is from China or elsewhere in the Far East.

Lungenflügel

2009, Pipilotti Rist

Pepperminta, a red-haired woman, travels across land and water in this work. She is mostly unclothed to represent a human being unconnected to a time, class or place. Her body is magnified and multiplied, while a pig, apples, tulips and strawberries appear distorted and giant. As Pepperminta moves through water, her menstrual blood blends into the sea. Rist has said, ‘I think a girl should shout for joy the first time she gets her period, because it is a symbol of creative power, of life. Blood, our lifeblood.’ Drawn in by her dream-like spaces and larger-than-life images, we might feel transported to another universe.

There is no dialogue for us to follow, only a psychedelic soundtrack by Anders Guggisberg and Roland Widmer – two of the artist’s many long-term collaborators. Rist uses saturated colours and special editing techniques in her work. Aiming to draw us into fantasy worlds so we also become part of them, Rist has said: ‘At first you look at the box, at the [television] screen or projection, but when you concentrate on the sequences you feel as if you’re inside the box, behind the glass, within the wall. You forget everything around you… you’re swallowed.’ Rist wants the artwork to feel ‘noble and inviting’.

Gallery label, April 2025

Hydra Decapita

2010, The Otolith Group

Hydra Decapita 2010 is a colour film shot in High Definition lasting just over thirty-one minutes and shown as a projection. It exists in an edition of five plus one artists’ proof; this copy is number two in the main edition. The film is centred on the work of Detroit-based techno music duo Drexciya. Drexciya, which was active from 1992–2002, consisted of James Stinson and Gerald Donald. In opposition to mainstream musicians of the time, Drexciya rejected the cult of personality and excess that surrounded the techno scene and instead focused on the conceptual and political. Afro-futurist theories were central to their practice and most notably in their album ‘The Quest’ (1997), where it was revealed that Drexciya was a submerged underwater country that was populated by the unborn children of pregnant women who were thrown overboard during the middle passage of slave ships across the Atlantic.

The Unfinished Conversation

2012, Sir John Akomfrah CBE

The Unfinished Conversation 2012 is a three-screen video installation that explores the multi-layered and ever-evolving subject of identity through an exploration of the memories and archives of the acclaimed British cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall (1932–2014). The film is narrated in a non-linear format and unfolds over three screens, bringing up a variety of disparate footage simultaneously. This process examines the nature of the visual as triggered across an individual’s memory. Extracted images from news footage of the 1960s, alongside Hall’s personal home videos and photographs, are presented to merge the past, present and future. Akomfrah weaves issues of cultural identity into the film using a wide range of reference, overlaying archive footage of Hall with a soundtrack made up of jazz and gospel music and readings from a wide range of authors, including William Blake, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Mervyn Peake.

Blue Abstraction

2012, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Blue Abstraction 2012 is a single-channel video with sound of a performance by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. Shot in a continuous take that lasts just under six and a half minutes, it shows a young man standing motionless by a dirt road in the middle of a landscape. He is approached by the artist who carries with him a can of blue paint and paintbrush. He applies paint in broad brushstrokes across the clothes and body of the man until his entire form is covered. The video ends with the artist walking away and the figure continuing to stand still. Ramírez-Figueroa’s use of blue paint is a reference to the history of early black and white cinema, which utilised the tendency for the film stock to turn blue objects white by covering figures in the colour to create the impression that they had disappeared.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf

2013, CAMP (Shaina Anand born 1975, Ashok Sukumaran born1974)

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf 2013 is a video with sound that includes footage shot on mobile phones as well as video cameras. Lasting eighty-three minutes, it is the outcome of a wider project of enquiry into maritime trade in the Indian Ocean. The film combines a series of videos shot by sailors who operate small shipping craft, documenting their everyday activities while at sea. Although the film does not have a narrative and can be watched from any point within the eighty-three-minute timeframe, it still contains within it a multiplicity of stories and events. The quality of the video changes from sequence to sequence, depending on the device and format on which it was originally shot. In one section a fish is caught for supper, in another a parked boat catches fire, in a third a young man poses for his sweetheart. Cars are packed full of dry goods and loaded on to boats, their destination scrawled on the windshield. Sometimes the camera watches other boats, or just focuses on the movement of the sea, or catches sight of dolphins. Other sequences record the mundane tasks of the crew during their long journey as they patch up the boat. Other stills are video-messages intended for loved ones at home. One is a prayer for safety in rough seas, another shows a capsized boat set to a suitably tragic tune. The audio features Bollywood songs of love and separation or folk music from Sindh and Balochistan, coming together to form an ethno-musicology of the sea.

Changing Room

2014, Helen Cammock

Cammock’s work explores issues of identity, racism and class from the perspective of a queer woman of colour. Central to her practice is the voice: the uncovering of marginal voices in history, the question of who speaks on behalf of whom, as well as how her own voice reflects on the stories explored in her work. Changing Room is shot in a series of interior and exterior domestic environments. Cammock recounts difficult memories of her father’s experience of settling in England. She speaks about her and her father‘s experiences of living in a rural location as people of colour and the impact that structural racism has on their lives, including intimate familial dynamics and experiences. Cammock reads extracts of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 text Black Skin, White Masks, which explores the dehumanising effects of racism experienced in situations of colonial domination.

Gallery label, October 2022

Love is the Message, The Message is Death

2016, Arthur Jafa

Love is the Message, The Message is Death 2016 is a seven-minute video made up of clips assembled from various sources and collaged together. The video is shown as a projection in a single-room installation. Jafa’s sources include historical material (for instance, footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights marches); contemporary clips from news media (such as President Barack Obama singing Amazing Grace in Charleston after delivering the eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of nine people murdered by the white supremacist Dylann Roof); clips that have gone viral after being uploaded from mobile phones onto the internet (a policeman killing Walter Scott by shooting him in the back in 2015; another policeman drawing a gun on teenage girls at a Texas pool party in the same year); footage of African American athletes and musicians (for instance, Muhammad Ali, Lebron James, Serena Williams, John Coltrane, the Notorious B.I.G., Beyoncé); footage of dancing and swag surfing from worldstarhiphop.com; fragments of works by other artists (Kahlil Joseph’s Until the Quiet Comes 2012; Martine Syms’s The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto 2015); Jafa’s personal video from his daughter’s wedding; footage of writer Saidiya Hartman from Jafa’s documentary film Dreams are Colder than Death 2013; and imagery from horror films and films of solar flares. This material is set to Kanye West’s song Ultralight Beam (2016). The audio is broken up at various points, including in the middle of the film where the actor and activist Amandla Stenberg asks, ‘What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?’

Vivian’s Garden

2017, Rosalind Nashashibi

Vivian’s Garden 2017 is a thirty-minute colour film with sound that depicts the relationship between two Swiss /Austrian émigré artists who are mother and daughter – Elisabeth Wild (born 1922) and Vivian Suter (born 1949). The film was shot and is set in the connected houses the two women share in a jungle garden in Panajachel, Guatemala, where they have developed a matriarchal compound in an environment that seems to be a site of both refuge and fear. The home and garden are places of terror as well as healing, and the film outlines how, for example, a recent problem with a criminal neighbour caused the pair to be under curfew and threats, while catastrophic floods, kidnappers and fear of intruders are ever-present. On the other hand, they lead an idyllic life, making art in beautiful surroundings, living simply, being taken care of and taking care of each other.

Don’t Look at the Finger

2017, Hetain Patel

Don’t Look at the Finger 2017 is a 16-minute high-definition film with a cinematic soundscape which, at first, appears to follow the rituals of a West-African marriage ceremony within the setting of a church. Soon it becomes apparent that the protagonists may be deaf and that the couple are participating in an arranged marriage. As the initial vows are delivered in a form of sign language, the couple’s actions and movements become more physical and soon their gestures develop into a high-energy and stylised martial arts fight sequence. The title of the film references a quote by Bruce Lee from the 1973 Kung-Fu film Enter the Dragon, one of the many sources that Hetain Patel draws on in his practice that question the forms of communicating cultural identity through performance and popular culture. For Patel, who grew up in a generation of promoted multiculturalism in Britain, Hollywood and popular films were a source of escapism and a subject of shared interest to connect with his peers across diverse cultural backgrounds.

Expedition for Four Hands and Accompaniment

2019, Anna Daučíková

Expedition for Four Hands and Accompaniment 2019 is an expansive installation comprising a three-channel video projection with sound, twenty-one large glass sheets resting on stones and a newspaper-format publication. In the videos, two pairs of hands, deliberately ambiguous in gender, perform actions of cutting glass and handling cloth, culminating in a gestural courtship ‘dance’ in the dark and uncertain setting of a cave. This imagery is punctuated by five textual stanzas of a manifesto-poem that celebrates fluidity as a state of being (‘delighted by incomprehensibility and disputability of the picture/in hallucinations we invent ourselves’). Below, spotlit glass sheets reflect the projection onto the gallery walls, distorting the image. Seven of the sheets include text scratched into them with a titanium tool, further proclaiming a challenge to fixed identity categories through poetic expressions (‘You will never be a “whole”; you will be a part that plays out in contact with other surfaces. It comes into existence in motion’), references to gender theory and a tally of trans individuals killed since 2000. An accompanying newspaper-style publication, originally designed to be taken away by visitors but now also displayed in a vitrine if required, contains texts in dedication to Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh, a Greek activist murdered in 2018. Overall, the work makes a case for articulating oneself without relying on secure, fixed notions of identity.

End Credits

2012–20, Sir Steve McQueen

End Credits 2012 is a single-screen projection with audio, shown on a continuous loop. The work is inspired by the life of the African American singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson (1898–1976). It consists of black and white copies of scans of every document in Robeson’s recently declassified FBI file, the majority of which have been heavily redacted with black marker. A successful movie star in the 1930s, Robeson became increasingly committed to political and social issues. A powerful voice for social justice, Robeson was actively involved with the Civil Rights Movement in America and is considered an important symbol of the fight against fascism abroad and racism at home. In 1946, together with W.E.B DuBois and Albert Einstein, Robeson organised the National Crusade to End Lynching. His advocacy of anti-imperialism and affiliation with communism resulted in him being blacklisted by the United States government during the McCarthy era and his career as a performer was destroyed. His championship of the rights of workers and blacks, a trip to the Soviet Union and public appearances both at home and abroad not only made Robeson one of the most celebrated figures in the African American movement; he was also perceived as a serious threat to the anti-Communist politics of the Cold War. FBI documents obtained by McQueen through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that United States surveillance agencies had begun investigating Robeson as early as 1941. This scrutiny continued throughout the rest of his life. In poor health, he spent his final decade in seclusion in New York and Philadelphia.

Keith Piper & Rex Whistler: Viva Voce and the Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats

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