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Natasha Ruwona

Event Archive

Natasha Ruwona

Co-programmed by LUX Scotland and David Dale Gallery

Natasha Ruwona_UMBILIC_2021

JUNE 2021

Programmed by Natasha Ruwona


UMBILIC, Natasha Ruwona, 2021, 14 minutes, 57 seconds

UMBILIC is a moving-image essay film that uncovers an expansion on the current discourse of Hydrofeminism through a mapping of research into water, in line with a Black Feminist Geographical framework. An excavation into Scotland’s Black history, this work began in 2020, incidentally the Year of Scottish Coasts and Waters (which has been continued into 2021).  What can we learn from water?  Fluidity, impermanence, ease of movement, care, methods to listen, tenderness – we can liquify ourselves, and look to water to guide us, provide answers, inspire questions.  UMBILIC is an offering – forever incomplete.  


Look Then Below, Ben Rivers, 2019, 22 minutes, 30 seconds

The film conjures up futuristic beings from an eerie smoke filled landscape and the depths of the earth. Look Then Below was shot in the vast, dark passages of Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset. The netherworld of chambers, carved out over deep time, once held remnants of lost civilisations, now foretell a future subterranean world, occupied by a species evolved from our environmentally challenged world. Part three of a trilogy of speculative films with text written by Mark von Schlegell.

Courtesy Ben Rivers and LUX London. 

NATASHA THEMBISO RUWONA is a Scottish-Zimbabwean artist, researcher and film programmer based in Glasgow.  They are interested in Afrofuturist storytelling through the poetics of the landscape, working across various media including; digital performance, film, DJing and writing.  Their current project Black Geographies, Ecologies and Spatial Practice is an exploration of space, place and the climate as related to Black identities and histories.  Natasha is interested in different forms of magic and is in particular drawn to the power of the moon. They are the current resident for Alchemy Film and Arts where they are researching Tom Jenkins – Britain’s first Black Schoolteacher, and the migratory patterns of salmon through the lens of queer ecologies. 

 

David Dale Gallery and LUX Scotland are excited to present a series of three monthly online screenings in collaboration with Natasha Ruwona, Siri Black and Saoirse Amira Anis, three Scotland-based artists working with moving image. From June to August, a different artist each month will present a recent moving image work of their own alongside a film that they have selected from the LUX collection. The film programmes will be hosted on David Dale Gallery’s website and will be available to watch for free for the duration of each month. In addition, each artist will present a contextual event to explore themes within their practice.

This is the second screening programme organised by David Dale Gallery and LUX Scotland. The first iteration was produced in collaboration with Hannah James, Sulaïman Majali, Alexander Storey-Gordon and Winnie Herbstein in 2019–  you can see more about this project here.

Image courtesy residues of wetness

EVENT

Accessing Water with Natasha Ruwona and residues of wetness
Tuesday 29th June
6 – 7:45pm
Zoom

Click here to visit the in conversation site

Natasha Ruwona is in conversation with the group residues of wetness, where they will discuss their individual and collective practices of/with water, and offer readings of the films UMBILIC and Look Then Below. Themes of the event include: locatedness, sonic listening, and temporality. There will be the opportunity to ask questions and discuss with each other during the conversation.

This event has been programmed by Natasha Ruwona as part of their online screening programme on David Dale Gallery’s website during June 2021. This series of monthly online screenings has been co-programmed by LUX Scotland and David Dale Gallery.

residues of wetness brings together interdisciplinary researchers and art practitioners that converged at the Ocean(s) as Archive(s) seminar by Ayesha Hameed in 2019. As part of our practice, we are developing a virtual space that operates as a digital archive of collective thinking with and about water, its entanglements, fluidities and discontinuities. This space is inhabited by traces of our ideas together with found images, videos, sounds, and readings that invoke different aquatic imaginaries. We hosted our first public event in December 2020. In spring 2021, we organised a three-part reading group entitled “navigating in/with/through the water” to explore water through imaginary, scientific, material and linguistic accounts.

 

residue of wetness Bios:

Olga Paczka – Multimedia artist and researcher preoccupied with tentacular creatures and music of extremely low frequencies. Her recent lines of inquiry point towards speculative fictions around the themes of interconnectivity, ritual and apocalypse. She is currently studying Contemporary Art Theory and completed a BA in Fine Art & Art History at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Patricia Roig Canepa – Researcher exploring the instability of water across states, scales, and time. As part of her MRes in Advanced Practices at Goldsmiths, University of London, she is writing about water’s paradoxical and incommensurable relationship to language.

Sara Tammone (she/they) – Interdisciplinary time-traveller and researcher of worl(d)s concerned with forms of collective study relying on intimacy, gathering, contact, touch, love and refusal. Their practice is fuelled by a phenomenological approach mixed with an amateur enthusiasm whether through the medium of writing, film, or photography often exploring the relations between bodies and spaces. They hold a Postgraduate diploma in History of Art from University of Bologna and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, London.

Nastia Volynova – Moscow-based interdisciplinary researcher and writer, with a background in art history. In her practice, she searches for the residues of Soviet historical, environmental and cultural narratives and attempts to reconstitute the missing histories they unfold to address the complexity of post-Soviet spaces. She holds a Postgraduate diploma in Curating and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.