Monday February 13, 7:30pm
YES: Miatta Kawinzi / Africanus Okokon
Screening In-Person Only
Artists in person — Q&A follows the screening
Microscope is very pleased to present the first 2023 edition of our emerging series YES with a screening of works by Miatta Kawinzi and Africanus Okokon.
The roughly 60-minute program of works by Kawinzi and Okokon address colonial histories and the African diaspora, from the looting of artifacts to the eradication of languages, as well as the sense of uprooting and fragmentation caused by forced displacement. The artists also share an interest in analog technologies such as 16mm film, cassette tapes, and synthesizers, as well as in the spoken or sung word, which is often altered or reprocessed to become part of their soundtracks.
For Kawinzi, the utilization of text and linguistics is central, expanding to and often taking hold of both the visual and sonic realms, as letters permeate the screen and words the soundtrack. For example, in “A(f)mrka,” two adjacent screens are filled with scattered letters that upon closer look form words, narratives, and questions such as “who afrka’d my amrka?,” and viceversa. Additionally, the audio track in this work is a re-edited vocalization by the artist that is inspired by the Liberian and the Black (American) National Anthems. The latest work on the program by Kawinzi is “SHE GATHER ME,” which the artist describes as presenting “alternative ways of considering place and the search for a space of belonging & refuge.” Shot on HD video and 16mm film, Kawinzi’s stunning imagery, which is interrupted by brief moments of blackness, is intensified by the sounds of a Black American folk song originally sung by workers and re-interpreted by Kawinzi.
Okokon, in his works, often lets the video or celluloid footage he appropriates and re-elaborates, speak for itself through juxtapositions exposing the beliefs and ramifications of colonialism, from a historical point of view to the present day. In “Venice,” an upbeat TV commentary describing Venetian gondolas stands in stark contrast with footage of canoes — often operated by young boys — in Makoko, Nigeria, an informal settlement in the city of Lagos referred to as the “Venice of Africa.” At the start of Okokon’s 16mm film performance “.srt” a text-to-speech voiceover announces that the story we are about to hear “is subtitled so you might be able to understand it.” As the computerized voice narrates, imagery from educational films, as well as YouTube clips and the artist’s own home movies, alternate on screen to a live soundtrack. In the two-channel work “Give the Picture,” mesmerizing sequences of painted, scratched, bleached, and silkscreened film offer condensed and meticulously assembled views from Nigeria, Ghana and the United States as represented mostly in movie and television reels. At the end, a subtitle emerges from the left screen: “All of you have seen!”
Miatta Kawinzi and Africanus Okokon will be available for a Q&A following the screening.
General Admission $9
Member Admission $7
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Miatta Kawinzi is a Kenyan-Liberian-American experimental filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist raised in the US South and based in NYC. She explores hybridity in the African Diaspora and the re-imagining of the self, identity, place, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Her work has screened at Pan African Film Festival with LACMA (upcoming), Ann Arbor Film Festival (honor: No. 1 African Film Award), New Orleans Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, Rockaway Film Festival with Alfreda’s Cinema, NewFest, Museum of the Moving Image, and Maysles Cinema. Her work has been exhibited at CUE Art Foundation, the Studio Museum in Harlem, BRIC, ICA LA, and the Africa Center. Her practice has been supported by residencies at Smack Mellon, MacDowell, POV Spark, IEA at Alfred University, IDM at NYU Tandon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Beta-Local, the Bag Factory, and the Bemis Center; and the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, New York Artadia Award, and Queer|Art Barbara Hammer Grant. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College.
Africanus Okokon works with the moving image, performance, painting, assemblage, collage, sound, and installation to explore the dialectics of forgetting and remembrance in relation to cultural, shared, and personal mediated histories. He received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2013 and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2020, where he was a recipient of the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship. Okokon has performed, screened, and shown work in international venues including the Ottawa Animation Film Festival, the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, the BlackStar Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Chale Wote Street Art Festival, the International Print Center in New York, Sean Kelly Gallery, Microscope Gallery, Perrotin Gallery, Helena Anrather Gallery, Pioneer Works, and The Kitchen. Okokon was a 2021–2022 Studio Fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, Connecticut. His work has been featured in publications such as The Yale Review, New American Paintings, PopMatters, and the Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music. He is an Assistant Professor in Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and is based in New Haven, Connecticut.
