A&H Screening Room 2023
New to Arts&Heritage's Screening Room Channel is Enam Gbewonyo's 'Under the Skin of a Guild: Wake of Lost Souls' with Liz Gre.
Arts&Heritage (A&H) is delighted to share the next film available to view in our online Screening Room Channel. Under the Skin of a Guild: Wake of Lost Souls, 2023 is a new work by artist Enam Gbewonyo made with director Freddie Leyden with an original score composed by Liz Gre, who also appears in the film, and sound design from MRWIZE.
Under the Skin of a Guild: Wake of Lost Souls emerged from a closed live performance which A&H commissioned in April 2022 as part of our 10th anniversary programme. The subsequent film based on the performance is jointly commissioned by A&H and Guildhall Art Gallery, London.
The Guildhall building is the setting for a film which moves between the upper level where the Art Gallery is located to the lower levels of the building and the Great Hall, the original site of the Zong trial in March 1783. The Zong massacre was a mass killing of more than 130 enslaved African people by the crew of a British slave ship called ‘Zong’ on 29th November 1781 and the days following. Slave owners attempted to claim insurance for their “loss of cargo” having thrown these slaves overboard during the Middle Passage. This highly charged site was selected by the artist and the film invokes the ancestral spirits of the deceased slaves and channels the emotions tied to their murders, embedded as they are within the histories of Guildhall. The artist proposes that by having two Black descendants of these victims, Gbewonyo and Gre, inhabiting a space so tied to the foundations of colonialism, Empire, patriarchy, and violence, a dialogue is created between the atrocities of the past and their imprints on the present. An atmosphere of fear, grief and defiance is poignantly illustrated as both artists move through the space level by level, moving as if through time as well as space.
Enam Gbewonyo is a British Ghanaian textile and performance artist whose practice investigates identity, womanhood, and humanity while advocating the healing benefits of craft. She uses performance as a vessel, creating live spaces of healing that deliver the collective consciousness to a positive place of awareness.
Gbewonyo is represented by TAFETA gallery in London and her work has been exhibited at Gagosian (London), Mostyn Gallery (Wales), the Women’s Art Collection (Cambridge University), FRAC MECA Aquitaine (France) and Fondazione Imago Mundi’s, Galerie delle Prigone (Italy) to name a few. Her works are also part of several private collections. She is the 2022 winner of the Dentons Art Prize and New Art Exchange’s Future Exhibition Fund respectively, a recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2021 Janome Fine Art Prize. She is also a Black Rock Senegal, Artist in Residence Fellow.
Among others, Gbewonyo has performed at the 58th Venice Biennale opening week, as part of the 1:54 African Art Fair Marrakech 2020 public programme for Black Shade Projects, at Henry Moore Institute – an activation of Senga Nengudi’s Sandmining artwork presented in collaboration with the International Curators Forum and a livestream performance for Tate Britain responding to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition, Fly In League With The Night. The performance was in collaboration with vocalist and sound artist Liz Gre.
Liz Gre is a sound artist-researcher, composer, performance and multi-modal installation artist whose works explore the opacity of human experience through collaboration. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at City, University of London and a Senior Teaching Fellow of Composition and Creative Technology at the University of Southampton.
Gre has exhibited at Lisson Gallery (London, UK), The Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, USA) and Queens Museum (New York, USA) to name a few and her performances include; North Star: Conversations on Boundlessness Symposium, Lincoln Center (New York, USA), Under the Skin of a Guild: Wake of Lost Souls a collaborative performance and film with artist Enam Gbewonyo co-commissioned by Arts&Heritage and Guildhall Art Gallery, London Guildhall (London, UK), We Invoke the Black. To Rest a collaborative performance with artist Enam Gbewonyo activating Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition Fly in League with the Night, Tate Britain (London, UK).
Originally from the west of Ireland, Freddie has spent the last 10 years honing his craft in London. His unique and exciting style of filmmaking is steeped in artistic and historical visual references. His films, which both reference art and are artworks in themselves, have made him internationally sought after. He has made films for the biggest brand names in the art world and beyond. His groundbreaking new short film FARMERS!? was shot in Ireland in 2023 and is currently in post production.
Recent accolades include; Vimeo Staff Pick, BEST OF THE YEAR, Kinsale Sharks 2023 GOLD, BEST DIRECTION, Cannes Lions 2023 FILM CRAFT, DIRECTION, Telly Awards 2023 GOLD, BEST DIRECTION, Young Arrows 2023 FINALIST, BEST NEW DIRECTOR and Shiny Awards 2022, BEST EMERGING DIRECTOR
Previously shown projects on the A&H Screening Room:
Online from 6 November – 19 November 2023
Turner-nominated artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler’s work Ilam Actual (version) 2023 was part of Arts&Heritage’s Meeting Point programme, funded by Arts Council England. The project was a culmination of Fowler’s work with young people, via CIC Soft Touch Arts, at the National Trust’s Ilam Hall and YHA’s Ilam Park, guiding the young people to respond to the grounds and wider environment of the Peak District over the course of a single weekend. It is composed of a series of non-narrative ‘actuality films’ and sound recordings made by each participant, under the guidance of Luke Fowler, experimental filmmaker Alex Hetherington and sound artist Lee Patterson.
Sophie Dixon: Grace, 2021
Online from 26 June – 30 July 2023
Sophie Dixon’s work, Grace (2021) was originally part of Arts&Heritage’s Meeting Point programme, for which Dixon created her film from her research at The RNLI’s Grace Darling Museum. Dixon’s film installation explored Grace Darling and her historic rescue of nine stranded survivors onboard the shipwrecked SS Forfarshire in 1838, on the 183rd anniversary of the rescue.
Anna Cady: It’s People & It’s Plants, 2022
Online from 11 May – 12 June 2023
A&H presented Anna Cady’s film, It’s People & It’s Plants (2022), alongside two shorter films: Bluets (2022) and Betty’s Butterfly Box (2022), all made during a spring 2022 residency at Furzey Gardens, New Forest National Park. The residency was part of A&H’s Meeting Point programme. Anna Cady created this series of new films to mark the centenary of Furzey Gardens and collaborate with the people they support; adults with learning disabilities while working alongside the staff, volunteers, gardeners and visiting public.
Jordan Baseman: Do Faster Win More, 2022
Online from 18 April – 7 May 2023
Do Faster Win More explored ambition, success and failure through the lens of Paralympic cyclist Lora Fachie OBE. Inspired by the history of the National Paralympic Heritage Trust, Do Faster Win More revealed the timelessness and universality of certain human qualities and ideas and created new ways for people to connect with Paralympic heritage. Baseman’s 11-minute film built on interviews with Lora and was then added to the collection of the National Paralympic Heritage Trust.
Savinder Bual: The Train Effect, 2022
Online from 23 February – 7 April 2023
Savinder Bual’s film The Train Effect was inspired by how, in 1840, the Great Western Railway introduced ‘Railway Time’, meaning a single, standardised time was used on its line, and subsequently across railway stations in Great Britain. The film, previously installed in the waiting room at Didcot Railway Centre in 2022 as part of A&H’s Meeting Programme 5, was accompanied with writing by the artist and a reflective essay by art critic Ingrid Swenson.