Archival Address: Films by Ayo Akingbade and Morgan Quaintance

Streamed from October 14 through October 20

A young generation of moving-image artists in the United Kingdom is crafting important works that display their poetry, passions, and personal histories. Different in approach from traditional films about artists by documentarians, films about artists by artists expand the genre of nonfiction filmmaking.

Recently, London-based filmmakers Ayo Akingbade and Morgan Quaintance have each developed their own distinctive styles and approaches to filmmaking that explore what it means to place oneself in the frame—both literally and figuratively, as viewer and maker. Akingbade’s and Quaintance’s work intersects in the realm of the archive, as they consider and reconfigure evidence from the past to meet contemporary questions and desires.

With each of the six films in this series (three by Akingbade, three by Quaintance), viewers might consider what it means to document someone’s life across a not-so-distant past. Here are personal stories of artists—in front of and behind the lens—negotiating and claiming their place in a postcolonial, 21st-century England. With thanks to the artists and to LUX Moving Image, London.

Film descriptions by the artists. Claudette’s Star (Akingbade) and South (Quaintance) were both recently commissioned by Independent Cinema Office and LUX Moving Image, London, as part of Second Sight, a touring film program exploring the Black Film Workshop movement’s legacy, methods, aesthetic strategies, and histories throughout the 1980s.

Ayo Akingbade

Hella Trees

“Okay, let’s talk about trees. Why are you so obsessed with them?” asks Akingbade, the filmmaker, of young artist Rafiki, whose artistic practice focuses on trees: their individuality and presence. (2020, 7 minutes)

Claudette’s Star

An ode to the artist Claudette Johnson, a member of the UK’s Black Film Workshop movement that formed in the early 1980s in response to London’s Brixton riots. The film depicts young artists considering, with sheer wonder, who is given a voice. (2019, 6 minutes)

A Is for Artist

A young woman (played by the filmmaker) searches for inspiration, beginning with her father’s photo albums and memories. (2018, 4 minutes)

Morgan Quaintance

South

Two anti-racist and anti-authoritarian liberation movements—in South London and the South Side of Chicago, respectively—form the point of departure for South, an expressionistic investigation of the power of individual and collective voice. Interlinked with Quaintance’s autobiography, the film also considers questions of mortality and the will to transcend a world typified by concrete relations. (2020, 28 minutes)

Early Years

This portrait of Jamaican-born artistic polymath Barbara Samuels features an account of her first-generation, diasporic experience in London, and her discovery of the possibilities for self-actualization offered by an early entry into creative life. (2019, 15 minutes)

Another Decade

Starting from testimonies and statements made by artists and art historians during the 1994 Institute of International Visual Arts conference “Towards a New Internationalism,” Another Decade crosses diverse cultural territory, propelled by a sense that very little sociocultural or institutional change has taken place in the UK since that time. The work explores the dynamic tension between, on the one hand, art-world actors speaking a truth to institutional power and, on the other, lived realities of London’s multiracial citizenry. Those who necessarily inhabit a center of otherness. (2018, 27 minutes)