DÁ FALA

3 December, Het Utrechts Archief, Hamburgerstraat 28, Utrecht, 2 pm.

The final installment of the film-based program is devoted to an afternoon of screenings curated by Kiluanji Kia Henda (artist, Luanda), whose work is on view in the concurrent exhibition at BAK, Spacecraft Icarus 13. Narratives of Progress from Elsewhere.

The session entitled, Revisions of African Representation, explores the historical circumstances and tensions of newly independent African and Middle Eastern nations in the 1970s at the end of the colonial era. During the screening, interviews with then high-level politicians are shown that make clear the way in which military and economic support was provided to clashing factions in the “Third World,” such as Egypt, Israel, and Angola, by other countries including the two superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States. In uncovering the Cold War conflict that underlay the foreign-backed military support in the “Third World,” the footage also reveals that the two nations, in their race for expansion in the African continent and to strengthen their respective ideologies, underpinned the ensuing decades of instability and violent civil wars in these young African nations. 

A key film in the screening is Andreas Johnsen’s documentary A Kind of Paradise, 2011, which seeks to establish new articulations of cultural and national identities through a collective portrait of a new generation of artists, poets, and musicians working in Africa, a group of individuals who are shaped by, and emerge from, the deep social and political changes in the continent. Its position among the afternoon’s films juxtaposes the familiar images of natural disasters, poverty, and corruption that dominate our association with Africa, with the new and considered images from African cultural practitioners who grapple with their own knowledge of conflict in the continent.

Film screening, A Kind of Paradise, Andreas Johnsen, 2011, 60 mins, followed by a presentation by Kiluanji Kia Henda (artist, Luanda)

Kiluanji Kia Henda (born 1979) is a photographer and visual artist who also works in theater. His photographs grapple with colonial history and perceptions of modernism in Angola. Recent exhibitions include: Experimental Station: Research and Artistic Phenomena, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid, 2011; Other Possible Worlds, NGBK, Berlin, 2011; and 2nd Luanda Triennale, Luanda, 2010. Henda lives and works in Luanda.

For further information, please visit: www.bak-utrecht.nl.