The 2022 Film London Jarman Award Touring Programme

Grace Ndiritu, Black Beauty (2021), 29 mins

Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive (2020), 20 mins

Alberta Whittle, Lagareh (2022), 32 mins

Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Black Poirot (2018 – 2021), 21 mins

Morgan Quaintance, Surviving You, Always (2020), 18 mins

Jamie Crewe, False Wife (2022), 15 mins

Grace Ndiritu, ​‘Black Beauty’ (2021)

African fashion model Alexandra Cartier (aka Black Beauty) is doing a photo shoot advert for Black Beauty ecological face cream in the desert of Patagonia. When Alexandra is saying her lines, the blazing desert sun momentarily blinds her and she goes into a momentary cosmic hallucinatory state. Her inner vision shows a sound-stage with her as a Late Night talk show host called Karen Roberts, interviewing Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges about Climate change, pandemics, migration and Time.


Onyeka Igwe, ​‘a so-called archive’ (2020)

a so-called archive interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot in two separate colonial archive buildings — one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, UK — this double portrait considers the ​‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ​‘lost’ from these archives, mixing genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.


Alberta Whittle, ​‘Lagareh’ (2022)

Shot on location in Scotland, England, Sierra Leone and Barbados and featuring footage from Venice, Lagareh brings together histories and communities that connect across these geographies to decipher different modes of not only taking care of the dead and confronting grief but also imagining how to create families of kithship. Whittle embraces storytelling as a means of exploring ideas of displacement but also family and community.

The themes of the film build on ideas of the Caribbean Gothic and Hauntology, but are also bound by the desire to cultivate hope and personal healing as forms of resistance against a background of catastrophe. The film is intended to offer an insight into different potential layers of resistance that allow for Black love to be situated in proximity with historical sites of trauma that Whittle re-inscribes with rage, hope and exhaustion.


Rosa-Johan Uddoh, ​‘Black Poirot’ (2019 – 2021)

Black Poirot is a 20-minute ride on the Orientalised-Other Express, investigating a crime no one can remember, an internalized struggle with latent respectability politics, and featuring a special guest appearance from Édouard Glissant in the role that could have defined him. Appropriating the popular Agatha Christie’s Poirot detective novels, this work uses a well-known format to tell a not-so-well known history, while satirising the current trend for tokenistic casting practices.


Morgan Quaintance, ​‘Surviving You, Always’ (2020)

In Surviving You, Always, a narrative opposition between the proposed metaphysical highs of psychedelic drugs and the harsher actualities of concrete metropolitan life, sets up a formal and conceptual study in contrasts. These two realities also form the backdrop of an adolescent encounter told through still images and written narration. Voice-overs by American psychologist Timothy Leary and spiritualist Ram Dass, profess that psychedelic drugs trigger the expansion of consciousness. Simultaneously, on screen text tells us of Quaintance’s own experience as a teenager in 1990s South London, whose acid-infused journeys revealed the city’s built environment to be a nightmarish and alienating scene for the dissolution of self. Following both perspectives simultaneously is a mind-twisting exercise, but Quaintance’s seamless editing, confessional candour and compelling sound design reveal a hidden history of working class multicultural life in London that burns with multiple socio-political resonances, and a deep sense of urban melancholy.


Jamie Crewe, ​‘False Wife’ (2022)

False Wife is a work that leads its visitors through an ordeal of transformation. A poppers training video is typically a user-made compilation of pornographic clips, uploaded to adult video hosting sites. These clips are paired with text, hypnotic music, voiceovers, and instructions for action. Viewers are told to masturbate and sniff poppers, to let imagery and sensation meld, and reach a gooning ecstatic fervour.

False Wife is a poppers training video, but its material is obscure. Its narrative is drawn from a variety of folk tales in which transformation occurs, and relationships happen. Its footage is scavenged from sources that reflect these themes, reduced to slivers of significant imagery, rubbed together. These originating sources are warped or inflamed to say ambiguous things: to discuss desire, shame, transgression, and the longing for change, and the various ways we want — and don’t want — to face them.

Jarman Award 2022 main page on Film London website:
https://​filmlondon​.org​.uk/​f​l​a​m​i​n​/​t​h​e​-​j​a​r​m​a​n​-​a​w​a​r​d​/​j​a​r​m​a​n​-​a​w​a​r​d​-2022

Towner Eastbourne
Friday 23^rd September
Q&A with Morgan Quaintance
https://​townereastbourne​.org​.uk/

LUX Scotland, Glasgow
Tuesday 11^th October
Q&A with Onyeka Igwe
https://​luxscotland​.org​.uk/

Void, Derry
Tuesday 18^th October
Q&A with Jamie Crewe
https://​www​.derryvoid​.com/

G39, Cardiff
Wednesday 26^th October
Q&A with Grace Ndiritu
http://​www​.g39​.org/

Nottingham Contemporary
Monday 7^th November
Q&A with Rosa-Johan Uddoh
http://​www​.nottinghamcontem​por​ary​.org/

Spike Island, Bristol
Thursday 10^th November
Q&A with Alberta Whittle
http://​www​.spikeisland​.org​.uk/

Whitechapel Gallery, London
Saturday 12^th November
Event with all shortlisted artists
http://​www​.whitechapelgallery​.org/

Jamie Crewe

Jamie is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam University and Glasgow School of Art. They have had a number of solo exhibitions, including at Gasworks (London), Tramway (Glasgow), and Grand Union (Birmingham). Their work has also been presented in group exhibitions such as Glasgow International Festival Director’s Programme and I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). Jamie was the recipient of the tenth Margaret Tait Award, Scotland’s most prestigious moving image prize for artists, and the resultant work, Ashley, was premiered at Glasgow Film Festival in March 2020.

Onyeka Igwe

Onyeka is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. Onyeka’s video works have been screened at Camden Arts Centre (London), Dak’art OFF (Senegal) and Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh) and at film festivals internationally including European Media Arts Festival (Germany), London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival (Canada) and the Smithsonian African American film festival (USA). Solo exhibitions include The High Line (New York), Mercer Union (Toronto), LUX (London) and Jerwood Arts (London). She was awarded the Foundwork Artist Prize (2021) and the Berwick New Cinema Award (2019).

Grace Ndiritu

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan filmmaker and visual artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Her work is housed in museum collections such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The British Council, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Modern Art Museum Warsaw. Recent exhibitions include the British Art Show (2021/​2022), Kunsthal Gent (2021) and Nottingham Contemporary (2021). Her debut short film Black Beauty (2021) was screened at 72^nd Berlinale Film Festival (2022), FID Marseille (2021) and 16^th Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival (2021). Upcoming exhibitions include a mid-career survey at SMAK, Ghent, Belgium in 2023.

Morgan Quaintance

Morgan is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including MoMA (New York), McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (San Francisco), Konsthall C (Sweden), David Dale (Glasgow), European Media Art Festival (Germany), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Scotland), Images Festival (Toronto), International Film Festival Rotterdam and Third Horizon Film Festival (Miami). He is the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, the 2021 Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista in Spain, and the 2021 UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London.

Rosa-Johan Uddoh

Rosa-Johan is an interdisciplinary artist inspired by Black feminist practice and writing. Solo exhibitions include Stuart Hall Library (London), Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool), Focal Point Gallery (Southend-on-Sea) and Destiny’s Atelier (Oslo). Group shows include Workplace Gallery (London), Pioneer Works (New York), 68 Institute (Copenhagen) and EXILE (Vienna). Her work is in collections including the Arts Council Collection. She won the Artquest Peer Forum Award at Camden Arts Centre, received a Sarabande: Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation Scholarship – selected by Nick Night (OBE) and is a New Contemporaries Artist.

Alberta Whittle

Alberta is an artist, researcher and curator. She was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. She is Margaret Tait Award winner (2018/​9). Alberta has exhibited and performed in various solo and group shows including Gothenburg Biennale, Lisson Gallery (London), Liverpool Biennial, Art Night London, British Art Show, Glasgow International Festival, Eastside Projects (Birmingham), GoMA (Glasgow), the National Galleries of Scotland, 13^th Havana Biennale (Cuba), The Showroom (London) and the Apartheid Museum (Johannesburg). Her work has been acquired for the UK National Collections, The Scottish National Gallery Collections, Glasgow Museums Collections and The Contemporary Art Research Collection at Edinburgh College of Art.

Film London is the capital’s screen industries agency. We connect ideas, talent and finance to develop a pioneering creative culture in the city that delivers success in film, television, animation, games and beyond. We work to sustain, promote and develop London as a global content production hub, support the development of the city’s new and emerging filmmaking talent and invest in a diverse and rich film culture. Funded by the Mayor of London and the National Lottery through the BFI, we also receive support from Arts Council England, Creative Skillset and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Film London’s activities include:

• Maintaining, strengthening and promoting London’s position as world-class city to attract investment through film, television, animation and games

• Investing in local talent through a range of specialised production and training schemes

• Boosting employment and competitiveness in the capital’s screen industries by delivering internationally facing business development events

• Maximising access to the capital’s film culture by helping audiences discover film in all its diversity

• Promoting London through screen tourism

Film London also manages the British Film Commission (www​.britishfilmcommis​sion​.org​.uk) through a public/​private partnership which is funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport through the BFI, and UK Trade and Investment.

www​.filmlondon​.org​.uk
@Film_London

Since 2003, Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) has been at the very heart of the sector’s development, bringing artist filmmakers to a wider audience away from the margins. We provide professional support and expert training along with valuable funding and national and international exhibition opportunities in galleries, cinemas and for broadcast. Funded by Arts Council England, FLAMIN has commissioned over 200 productions and supported the careers of countless other artists. Flagship projects from FLAMIN include the commissioning fund FLAMIN Productions, the prestigious annual Film London Jarman Award, and development programmes The FLAMIN Fellowship and FLAMIN Animations, aimed at early career moving image artists.

www​.filmlondon​.org​.uk/​F​LAMIN