LUX Scotland presents: Alberta Whittle, everything is everything

I believe in the spirituality of the sacred. Not of religion, but of the sacred. What is the spirituality of the sacred? It’s the intuition of how we relate to the world. This is what the imaginary is: we feel the rumbling underneath us.

– Édouard Glissant

Alberta Whittle, recipient of the 2018/​19 Margaret Tait Award, presents a contextual screening bringing together mixed references that have shaped the development of her award commission, between a whisper and a cry (2019). In this film collage, as a methodology and way of thinking, creates a zone which accommodates varying perspectives and actively encourages multiple ways of knowing. Drawing together samples of sound, still and moving image, everything is everything hopes to introduce some of the ideas Whittle has been working through in the making of between a whisper and a cry.

Programme

Alberta Whittle, Mammmmmmmmywata Presents Life Solutions International, 2016, HD video, 4 min

Total running time: 40 min

Alberta Whittle will also be screening her Margaret Tait Award commissioned film between a whisper and a cry, at Circus Artspace, Inverness at 6pm on Friday 28 June, the event is free but ticketed: https://​bit​.ly/​2​F​mZbNa

As part of the Another Country exhibition at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery she will be running a banner/​poster making workshop on Saturday 29 June. For more information and booking visit: https://​bit​.ly/​2​R​oVcEz

Born in Barbados and currently resident in Glasgow, Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher and educator. Her practice is motivated by the desire to work collectively towards radical self-love. Informed by diasporic conversations, she considers radical self-love a key method in decolonization for people of colour to battle anti-blackness. Her practice involves choreographing interactive installations, using film, sculpture and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces.

Whittle’s work has been exhibited widely internationally at venues including the Johannesburg Pavillion at the 56^th Venice Biennale; Galerie de l’UQAM, Quebec; BOZAR, Belgium; Intermedia and David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; National Art Gallery of the Bahamas; VAN Lagos, Nigeria; the Apartheid Museum, Goethe on Main and Constitution Hill, South Africa. In 2018, Alberta was an Associate Artist at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow and a Fellow at RAW Académie in Dakar, Senegal. She presented her research at The Showroom in London as part of Holding Space in April 2018. She has also been a Committee Member of Transmission Gallery since 2016.

She has recently shown her work in the exhibition Stalking the Image: Margaret Tait and Her Legacy at GoMA, Glasgow. Alberta’s solo exhibition Business as Usual, is currently showing at Tyburn Gallery, London (31 May-27 June 2019). She will also mount a solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) titled How flexible can we make the mouth in Autumn, 2019.

Ayesha Hameed​’s moving image, performance and written work explores contemporary borders and migration, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic. Her projects Black Atlantis and A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) have been performed and exhibited internationally. She is the co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater, 2017) and is currently the Programme Leader for the MA in Contemporary Art Theory in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Hamedine Kane is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Brussels. His practice explores themes of exile, odyssey and memory. His works have been shown at the Villa Vassilief in Paris, at the Dak’Art Biennale of African Contemporary Art and at the Clark House Initiative in Mumbai.

Àl’ombre de nos phantômes/​In the Shadow of our Ghostsis a project by Hameed and Kane. The film tries to imagine the time spent by a migrant walking alone in desert spaces, Sahelian surroundings and urban environments. It ruminates on the intimacy between the walker and their shadow. The filmmakers turn to their collective imagination to consider this unique and tender dialogue between shadow and subject.

Miko Revereza is an award-winning experimental film and video artist based in Los Angeles. Since relocating from Manila as a child, he has been living illegally in the United States for over 20 years. This struggle and exile from his homeland has influenced the content of Miko’s personal films that explore themes of diaspora, colonialism and Americanization. His documentary debut Droga!explores the condition of hybrid cultural identity in its interaction with the Filipino-American community of Los Angeles. With its purposefully unresolved structure and an almost punk aesthetic attitude, we experience the repetitions, confusions and cultural dissonance of a transplanted community and identity.

Christian Noelle Charles is a Black female artist currently living and working in Glasgow. Working across the mediums of printmaking, video and performance, her practice is an exploration of female representation and self-love in a contemporary world. She takes inspiration from today’s pop culture, modern performance techniques and personal experiences. Ease on Down the Cornbreadis one of her earliest projects, based upon an annual series which lasted five years called The Cornbread Countdown. In this series, Charles created daily posts during the month of November leading up to Thanksgiving, reviewing iconic personal photographs and integrating them with cornbread. For Charles, this was a way to cope with homesickness whilst being away during college and represented a growing awareness of how her identity feeds into her practice.