Film London Jarman Award 2022 booklet

Welcome

Now in its fifteenth year, we are thrilled to present the Film London Jarman Award 2022. This year’s Award will be celebrated at the Barbican, spotlighting six incredible shortlisted artists and their practices. In the run up to the Award the artists’ films will also be available to view online and in person, providing an opportunity to meet the people behind the Award, bringing artists’ moving image to audiences across the UK and beyond. These artists truly reflect the spirit of the Award, celebrating diversity, experimentation and innovation by continuing to create and show work that questions and shapes the world around us.

We would like to congratulate the shortlisted artists and thank our funders, Arts Council England, as well as our national tour partners, Whitechapel Gallery and our Film London Jarman Award Patrons, for all their vital support in helping to sustain the legacy of Jarman himself and highlighting the cultural importance of contemporary artist filmmaking. Enormous thanks also go to Film London’s Artists’ Moving Image team, whose expertise and dedication have made the tour and Award possible.

Adrian Wootton OBE Chief Executive of Film London & the British Film Commission

Jarman Award 2022 tour

Towner Eastbourne

Friday 23rd September

Q&A with Morgan Quaintance

LUX Scotland, Glasgow Tuesday 11th October

Q&A with Onyeka Igwe

Void, Derry Tuesday 18th October

Q&A with Jamie Crewe

G39, Cardiff Wednesday 26th October

Q&A with Grace Ndiritu

Nottingham Contemporary Monday 7th November

Q&A with Rosa-Johan Uddoh

Spike Island, Bristol Thursday 17th November Q&A with Alberta Whittle

Whitechapel Gallery, London Saturday 12th November Event with all shortlisted artists

Barbican Centre, London Tuesday 22nd November Jarman Award winner ceremony

Film London Jarman Award 2022

Crewe

Ndiritu

Alberta Whittle

Jamie Crewe

Jamie Crewe is a beautiful bronze figure with a polished cocotte’s head. She makes artworks with video, text, installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, and more. These works think about constriction: the way people are formed by their cultures, environments and relationships; and the things that herniate from them as a consequence.

False Wife (2022) Local website, HD video at 60fps, 15 mins

False Wife seeks to lead viewers through an ordeal of transformation by drawing on the conventions of poppers training videos. A poppers training video is typically a usermade 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 substitutes pornographic clips for obscure material, with a narrative that draws on a variety of folk tales in which transformation occurs. Its footage is scavenged from sources that reflect these themes, which are warped or inflamed to say ambiguous things: to confront the various ways we want –and don’t want – to face desire, shame, transgression, and the longing for change.

False Wife is commissioned by the Edinburgh Law School.

Jamie Crewe, False Wife (2022), video still

Courtesy of the artist

Onyeka Igwe

Onyeka Igwe is an artist filmmaker who describes her practice as “a way of doing politics”. In her work, she navigates the dissonance, reflection and amplification of contrasting forces – the voice and the body, narration and text, sound and the archive. Describing her films as structural “figure-of-eights” that expose the multiplicity of narratives, Igwe seeks to disentangle this complex web of material in order to understand and document how we can live together.

a so-called archive (2020) HD video, 20 mins

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.

a so-called archive is a co-commission by: Mercer Union, Toronto; Plug-In ICA, Winnipeg; and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, with support from Julia Stoschek Collection and Outset Germany_Switzerland. Additional support from Adam Pugh and Tess Denman-Cleaver for the Projections programme. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Grace Ndiritu

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Her art and activism is inspired by alternative communities, spirituality and lifestyles. Through her moving image practice, Ndiritu proposes a type of expanded cinema that allows the public to witness and access non-rational states through the creation of art and cinema; as a way of changing their perspective on difficult subjects such as the environment, immigration and indigenous rights.

Black Beauty (2021) 16:9 HD 4K & 4:3 Mini DV Pro, 29 mins

In Ndiritu’s film Black Beauty, African fashion model Alexandra Cartier poses in the Patagonian desert to advertise an ‘ecological’ face cream. When Alexandra is saying her lines, the blazing desert sun momentarily blinds her and she goes into a momentary cosmic hallucinatory state. In her inner vision, she reappears as a Late Night talk show host called Karen Roberts, interviewing Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges about climate change, pandemics, migration and time.

Black Beauty is commissioned by: Arts Council England; Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Belgium; Coventry Biennial; and Nottingham Contemporary. Production support from 2deo and Tabakalera, San Sebastian. Produced by Una Presencia and PostHippie Productions.

Grace Ndiritu, Black Beauty (2021), film still

Courtesy of Post Hippie Productions

Morgan Quaintance

Morgan Quaintance’s moving image practice largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes in order to remain responsive and open to emerging interests, current affairs and historical events. His work encompasses a variety of forms including music, text, photography and curation, with film being the overarching container and expressive conduit for each.

Surviving You, Always (2020) HD video, 18 mins

In Quaintance’s film 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 acidinfused 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.

Rosa-Johan Uddoh

Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an interdisciplinary artist working towards radical self-love, inspired by Black feminist practice and writing. Through performance, writing and multi-media installation, she explores places, objects and celebrities in British popular culture, and their effects on self-formation. In her practice, Uddoh uses humour, appropriation and parody (historically used by diasporic subjects for resistance). Her artworks often recontextualise popular media formats and materials, to pull on memories widely shared by a British public, as a gesture towards taking ownership of mass-media.

Black Poirot (2019-21)

HD video, 21 mins

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

Courtesy of the

Alberta Whittle

Alberta Whittle’s practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. Her work is often made in response to current events and draws on her research into the African diaspora and the decolonisation of Western histories, with major themes including refusal, race, xenophobia and climate catastrophe.

Lagareh – The Last Born (2022) HD video, 43 mins

Shot on location in Scotland, England, Sierra Leone and Barbados and featuring footage from Venice, Lagareh – The Last Born 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 displacement, 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.

Lagareh –The Last Born is co-commissioned and produced by Scotland + Venice and Forma for the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

Photo by Jaryd Niles-Morris

of

Modern

About the Jarman Award

The Film London Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of UK-based artist filmmakers. The Award is inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman, and is presented in partnership with the Whitechapel Gallery.

Jarman Award 2022 Jury

Iwona Blazwick OBE Emeritus Curator, Whitechapel Gallery

Matthew Barrington, Cinema Curator, Barbican

Jasmina Cibic, Artist, winner of Jarman Award 2021

Shaminder Nahal, Commissioning Editor (Arts and Topical), Channel 4

Nicole Yip, Chief Curator, Nottingham Contemporary and Film London Board Member

Chaired by Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN)

Previous Jarman Award winners

Luke Fowler (2008) Lindsay Seers (2009) Emily Wardill (2010)

Anja Kirschner & David Panos (2011) James Richards (2012)

John Smith (2013)

Ursula Mayer (2014) Seamus Harahan (2015)

Heather Phillipson (2016)

Oreet Ashery (2017)

Daria Martin (2018) Hetain Patel (2019)

Michelle Williams Gamaker, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Jenn Nkiru, Larissa Sansour, Project Art Works and Andrea Luka Zimmerman (2020 joint winners) Jasmina Cibic (2021)