David Dale Gallery and LUX Scotland presents: Chizu Anucha

Join us on Saturday 29 October from 6pm for a performance by Chizu Anucha, which closes the screening of their work alongside a piece by Onyeka Igwe.

David Dale Gallery and LUX Scotland are excited to present a series of three screenings in collaboration with Owain Train MacGilvary, Joanne Lee and Chizu Anucha, three Scotland-based artists working with moving image. Through September and October each artist will present a recent moving image work of their own alongside a film which they have selected from the LUX collection. The film programmes will be presented for two weeks each in the David Dale Gallery warehouse. During each programme, each artist will present a contextual event to explore themes within their practice.

For the third event Chizu Anucha, will be showing his work ​‘Exist, React, Respond, Exist’ (2019) alongside ​‘No Archive Can Restore You’ (2020) by Onyeka Igwe.

Programme 3: Chizu Anucha

20 – 29 October (Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm)

‘Exist, React, Respond, Exist’, Chizu Anucha (2020)

‘No Archive Can Restore You’. Onyeka Igwe (2020)

Event Closing: 29^th October, 6 – 8pm with a performance by Chizu Anucha starts at 7:30pm (un-ticketed)

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‘Exist, React, Respond, Exist’, Chizu Anucha (2020) 8 mins 8 seconds

Commissioned by Tramway, Glasgow, ​‘Exist, React, Respond, Exist’ is a hyperreal perspective on largely mundane experiences. While encompassing Afrodiasporic trauma and fragmented methods of self-preservation we journey from Glasgow Harbour to Falkland Palace and Gardens in Glenrothes.

The film layers low resolution footage with obscured virtual reality VHS mixed with analogue feedback, and a rehearsal excerpt recorded on an iPhone 7 shaping the bulk of the work’s soundtrack. While exploring inherent subjectivity in perceiving space and time, the film meanders in an interplay between the picturesque and the uncanny. The song around which the film is centred, was born from journal entries written over a course of psychoanalytic therapy, repeating the affirmation, ​“It’s your mind getting better; over time.“

The film touches on Igbo ontology and Yoruba folklore after introducing voices of afrobeat, juju and highlife musicians, including King Sunny Ade. As vital as it is to showcase the reality of the Black experience in all of its forms, it’s equally crucial to bring particular focus to the process of healing in conjunction with trauma.

‘No Archive Can Restore You’, Onyeka Igwe (2020) 5 mins 54 seconds

The former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit, stands empty on Ikoyi Road, Lagos, in the shadow of today’s Nigerian Film Corporation building. The rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. Amongst these cans, a long-lost classic of Nigerian filmmaking, Shehu Umar (1976) was found in 2015. The films housed in this building are hard to see because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them. They reveal a colonial residue, that is echoed in walls of the building itself.Taking its title from the 2018 Juliette Singh book, ​‘No Archive Can Restore You’ depicts the spatial configuration of this colonial archive, which lies just out of view, in the heart of the Lagosian cityscape. Despite its invisibility, it contains purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see. The film imagines ​‘lost’ films from the archive in distinctive soundscapes, juxtaposed with images of the abandoned interior and exteriors of the building. This is an exploration into the ​‘sonic shadows’ that colonial moving images continue to generate.

This is the third screening programme co-organised by David Dale Gallery and LUX Scotland. The first iteration was produced in collaboration with Hannah James, Sulaïman Majali, Alexander Storey-Gordon and Winnie Herbstein in 2019, and the second was produced with Natasha Ruwona, Siri Black and Saoirse Amira Anis in 2021.

Image 1: A portrait image poster with text​‘LUX Scotland and DAVID DALE GALLERY present a series of film screenings in the warehouse’ in a white font that blurs against blurry image of a close up of a white iPhone showing an image of a motorway from the point of view of a car on its screen. The event details and film names appear below in capital serif letters.

Image 2: Zig-zagged graphic white lines form the shapes of three torsos over a background of firey orange clouds over a black horizon in an evening sky.

Image 3: A still shows an analogue clock on a blue-ish white wall with large cracks and stains. The clock’s hands read 12 minutes past 2.