Film London Jarman Award 2023
Welcome
Now in its sixteenth year, we are thrilled to present the Film London Jarman Award 2023, inspired by visionary filmmaker Derek Jarman. This year’s Award will be celebrated at the Barbican, spotlighting six incredible shortlisted artists and their innovative and boundarypushing practices. Bringing artists’ moving image to audiences across the UK and beyond, the artists’ films were available to view online and in-person in the run up to the Award. The nationwide touring programme was presented in partnership with a variety of our cultural venues, culminating in a day-long programme at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, providing opportunities for art and film
Jarman Award 2023 tour
Towner Eastbourne
Thursday 21st September
Q&A with Karen Russo
Nottingham Contemporary
Wednesday 4th October
Q&A with Ayo Akingbade
LUX Scotland, Glasgow
Tuesday 24th October
Q&A with Rehana Zaman
lovers to explore the work. The Film London Jarman Award is central to our support of artist filmmakers, celebrating its namesake’s spirit of experimentation and imagination. I would like to congratulate all six shortlisted artists and thank our funders, Arts Council England, for their vital support, as well as our returning partners at Barbican and Whitechapel Gallery. Enormous thanks also go to the Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network team, whose expertise and dedication have made the tour and Award possible.
Adrian Wootton OBE Chief Executive of Film London & the British Film Commission
Spike Island, Bristol
Thursday 2nd November
Q&A with Julianknxx
g39, Cardiff
Friday 10th November
Q&A with Andrew Black
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Saturday 11th November
Event with all shortlisted artists
The MAC Belfast
Tuesday 21st November
Q&A with Sophie Koko Gate
Barbican Centre, London
Tuesday 21st November
Jarman Award winner ceremony
Film London Jarman Award 2023
Shortlisted Artists
Karen Russo
Andrew Black
Sophie Koko Gate
Ayo Akingbade
Julianknxx
Rehana Zaman
Ayo Akingbade
Ayo Akingbade is an artist, writer and director based in London. She works predominantly with film and installation to address themes of power, urban space and stance. Much of Akingbade’s work has documented experiences of rapid social change brought about by gentrification in London, with a particular focus on Hackney, where she was born and raised. Moving between experimental essay films, documentary, and more traditional narrative shorts, her practice is grounded in a commitment to analogue techniques.
Jitterbug (2022)
16mm film transferred to HD video, 24 mins
Jitterbug chronicles a day in the life of eighteen-year-old student
Afeni Omolade, who lives with her parents and younger brother in a Hackney council block. An imaginative departure from the stylistic conventions of kitchen-sink realism, the film is a loving portrait of East London life, moving between familiar streets, homes and classrooms. While Afeni prepares to leave this world behind to study, the family receives news that will change their lives.
Jitterbug is commissioned by Artangel and Museum of the Home.
Ayo Akingbade, Jitterbug (2022), production still
Courtesy of the artist, Artangel and Museum of the Home
Andrew Black
Andrew Black is an artist and filmmaker based in Scotland. His work explores hidden and obscured stories found within the British landscape, creating portraits of places with which he has a biographical attachment. Black’s films look at how the infrastructures and ideologies of capitalism, militarism and nationalism have shaped the land and its inhabitants. Often working closely with local people, his work shows ways that communities can imagine and create alternative and oppositional ways of being.
Revenge Fantasy (2019)
HD video, 13 mins
Revenge Fantasy was filmed around Coulport and the Sound of Raasay, two locations on the West Coast of Scotland where the UK’s Trident nuclear programme is housed. Narrated by dancer/ choreographer Malik Nashad Sharpe (marikiscrycrycry), the film explores exhibitionism, secrecy and shame through a series of abject bodily interactions with the landscape. Travelling through chasms, sinkholes and precipices, animal bodies feature in the film as figures for queer states of excess and duress. Responding to a paranoid anxiety around privacy and surveillance in the specific context of this militarised landscape, the film confronts the dark underbelly of subterfuge and violence explicit in the names of the submarines hidden in the landscape: Revenge, Repulse, Vanguard and Vengeance.
Revenge Fantasy is commissioned by Dundee
Contemporary Arts
Andrew Black, Revenge Fantasy (2019), video still
Courtesy of the artist and Dundee Contemporary Arts
Julianknxx’s interdisciplinary practice merges his poetic work with performance, film and music, seeking to express the ineffable realities of human experiences while examining the structures through which we live. In casting his own practice as a ‘living archive’ or a ‘history from below’, Julianknxx draws on West African oral traditions to reframe how we construct both local and global perspectives. He does this through a body of work that challenges fixed ideas of identity and unravels linear historical and socio-political narratives.
Black Corporeal (Breathing by Numbers) (2022)
4K video, 16 mins
Black Corporeal (Breathing by Numbers) layers poetry, essay, documentary and music to expose the multiple realities of Black life in London and our relationships with the built environment. The film is anchored by the voice of Rosamund Adoo-KissiDebrah, who advocated to have air pollution listed as a cause of death of her nine-year-old daughter, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah – the first officially acknowledged case in UK history. While honouring a culture of resilience and perseverance, the film highlights the realities of social and environmental poverty in inner cities, which has a disproportionate impact on melanated bodies and working class communities.
Black Corporeal (Breathing byNumbers) is commissioned by Brixton House
Julianknxx
Julianknxx, Black Corporeal (Breathing by Numbers) (2022), film still
Courtesy the artist © Studioknxx
Sophie Koko Gate
Sophie Koko Gate is an artist, animation director, and writer based in London. Her practice both resembles and resists the features of mainstream animation, playing with the formulaic nature of storytelling to evoke the satisfying effect of conventional narrative without there ever being one. A strangely familiar cast of eccentric characters live on behind the scenes, aging and shapeshifting as they move between parallel worlds in each film. In her work, rare moments of pleasure are interrupted by frustrated desire, a longing for something that is never quite resolved.
Hotel Kalura (2021)
HD video, 5 mins
An older woman vacations alone on the romantic island of Sicily. She walks into a hotel bar, waiting to be lit. A holiday love story made in the dark hours of lockdown, Hotel Kalura weaves a fantasy romance of cosmic proportions, offering an escape from the banal disappointments of everyday life. Merging the tropes of classic cinema with Koko Gate’s trademark dayglo surrealism, the film sees isolation and longing give way to an ecstatic experience of (n)ever-lasting love.
Sophie Koko Gate, Hotel Kalura (2021), digital still
Courtesy of the artist
Karen Russo
Karen Russo is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Her work is interested in the dividing line between what is accepted as the legitimate expression of culture and civilized existence, and what falls outside of it. By tracing marginalized practices, obscure phenomena, and esoteric forms of knowledge through film installations, drawings, writing and photographs, she addresses how we seek to understand the unseen and the unknown. Her filmmaking practice blurs documentary and fiction to explore how the rational and the obscure are intertwined in knowledge, perception and culture.
Junkerhaus (2021)
16mm transferred to HD video, 8 mins
Junkerhaus is shot in the former residence of architect Karl Junker (1850-1912) who dedicated his life to building his house in Lemgo, Germany. Junker made his house his life’s work, cocooning himself within a maze of elaborate wood carvings which extended over all floors, furniture and into all corners like a spider’s web. Conjuring a mirage of imagined forms with the physical space, the film plays with reflected and projected light to animate, warp and dissolve the heavy wooden surfaces and structures, to produce a fluid environment that offers a new appreciation of Junker’s architecture as mystical and visionary experience.
Karen Russo, Junkerhaus (2021), film still Courtesy of the artist
Rehana Zaman
Rehana Zaman is an artist living and working in London. Her work speaks to notions of kinship and sociality, seeking out possibilities of intimacy and transgression within hostile contexts. Conversation and cooperative methods sit at the heart of her films which extend into texts, performances and group work.
Alternative Economies (2021)
HD video, 28 mins
Made in conversation with herbalist Rasheeqa Ahmad and financial services regulator Rachel Bardiger, Alternative Economies reads the imperialist exploits of the Disney character Scrooge McDuck alongside the apparently radical yet deeply compromised promises of cryptocurrency. Between these strands, the practice of foraging and the production of herbal medicine reveal possibilities for an alternative network of exchange and subsistence. Combining observational documentary footage, fragments from ‘DuckTales: The Land of Trala La’ (1987) and direct animation (created by painting on celluloid), the film draws together an unlikely constellation of processes and ideas to find new ways of thinking through our relationship to finite resources.
Alternative Economies is commissioned by Borås Art Biennial 2021
Rehana Zaman, Alternative Economies (2021), video still
Courtesy of the artist and Borås Art Biennial
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 Barbican and the Whitechapel Gallery.
Jarman Award 2023 Jury
Matthew Barrington, Cinema Curator, Barbican
Shaminder Nahal, Commissioning Editor (Arts and Topical), Channel 4
Michelle Williams Gamaker, Artist and 2020 Jarman Award jointwinner
Lila Rawlings, Head of Creative: Film and Television, Esperanto Filmoj 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)
Grace Ndiritu (2022)
