Poster by Greer Lockyear.

Exhibition
20th – 29th October

Closing 
29th October, 6 – 8pm
Performance starts at 7:30pm

Open
Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm

David Dale Gallery Warehouse, 161 Broad Street, Glasgow, G40 2QR

The warehouse is accessible via the main gallery entrance on Broad Street and across the back courtyard. There is ramped access into the warehouse. 

Programmed by Chizu Anucha

Exist, React, Respond, Exist, Chizu Anucha, 2020, 8 mins

Commissioned by Tramway, Glasgow, ‘Exist, React, Respond, Exist’ is a hyperreal perspective on largely mundane experiences. While encompassing Afrodiasporic trauma and fragmented methods of self-preservation we journey from Glasgow Harbour to Falkland Palace and Gardens in Glenrothes.

The film layers low resolution footage with obscured virtual reality VHS mixed with analogue feedback, and a rehearsal excerpt recorded on an iPhone 7 shaping the bulk of the work’s soundtrack. While exploring inherent subjectivity in perceiving space and time, the film meanders in an interplay between the picturesque and the uncanny. The song around which the film is centred, was born from journal entries written over a course of psychoanalytic therapy, repeating the affirmation, “It’s your mind getting better; over time.”

The film touches on Igbo ontology and Yoruba folklore after introducing voices of afrobeat, juju and highlife musicians, including King Sunny Ade. As vital as it is to showcase the reality of the Black experience in all of its forms, it’s equally crucial to bring particular focus to the process of healing in conjunction with trauma.

No Archive Can Restore You, Onyeka Igwe, 2020, 5 mins, 54 secs

The former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit, stands empty on Ikoyi Road, Lagos, in the shadow of today’s Nigerian Film Corporation building. The rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. Amongst these cans, a long-lost classic of Nigerian filmmaking, Shehu Umar (1976) was found in 2015. The films housed in this building are hard to see because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them. They reveal a colonial residue, that is echoed in walls of the building itself. Taking its title from the 2018 Juliette Singh book, No Archive Can Restore You depicts the spatial configuration of this colonial archive, which lies just out of view, in the heart of the Lagosian cityscape. Despite its invisibility, it contains purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see. The film imagines ‘lost’ films from the archive in distinctive soundscapes, juxtaposed with images of the abandoned interior and exteriors of the building. This is an exploration into the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial moving images continue to generate.

Chizu Anucha (aka chizu nnamdi) is a Scottish afrodiasporic artist of Igbo Nigerian heritage, currently based in Glasgow and working in music and moving image. His practice is multidisciplinary and collaborative, meeting at the intersection of music composition, video and site-responsive performance. Exhibitions of his moving image work and music performance have been presented at V&A Dundee (2021); Edinburgh Art Festival (2021); Tramway, Glasgow (2020); The Royal Glasgow Institute, Glasgow (2020); McLellan Galleries, Glasgow (2019). He is currently co-producing and soundtracking a short film as part of Rhubaba’s ongoing project on Maud Sulter and he was a monthly contributor to Clyde Built Radio (2021-22).

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. She is born and based in London, UK. In her non-fiction video work Onyeka uses dance, voice, archives, sound design and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises of untieable strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound; in the work as much in life, what is said and what we see are not always the same thing.

David Dale Gallery and LUX Scotland are excited to present a series of three screenings in collaboration with Owain McGilvary, Joanne Lee and Chizu Anucha, three Scotland-based artists working with moving image. 

More information here.