For the September Now Showing Cinenova have invited London based artist Evan Ifekoya, who will be showing a preview of work in progress ​She was a full body speaker.*

This new work draws on the artist’s personal archive as well as that of artist filmmaker Sandi Hughes. The work addresses blackness, sociality and inheritance diffracted through queer nightlife and trauma as an endless repetition.

Evan Ifekoya’s Cinenova film selections are:

MISS QUEENCAKE - Amanda Holiday. 1991, 24 minutes
Mixing reality with fairy tale, MISS QUEENCAKE follows the plight of Bira, a 16-year- old mixed race girl from the North of England. Scenes in a school from Bira’s childhood touch on the racism inflicted on her and her eventual escape into her own world. In her fantasy she is a Princess, in reality her father marries her off to a white boatman. The newly-wed couple, the boatman eager and full of racist stereotypes and Bira, full of wariness, loathing and wisdom, embark on a honeymoon on his boat. Through beautiful imagery, poetry, myth and fairy tale, MISS QUEENCAKE explores and challenges the racist concept of ‘exoticism’, of the placing of Black women by white European men as ‘other’. Bira’s fantasy world, which could be construed as ‘crazy’, is in fact more real than the boatman’s. Her strength prevails, shattering the boatman’s dream and instilling her with power.

HAIRPIECE: A FILM FOR NAPPY HEADED PEOPLE - Ayoka Chenzira. USA 1982 10mins
Hairpiece is an animated satire on Black consciousness from the standpoint of various haircare devices. The film uses photographs, drawings and collage to illustrate the social significance of different hair styles (such as the rebellious Afro of the 60s) and to trace the methods used by Black people to get woolly-type hair to ‘go straight’. The search for the magic potion or hair gel that will stop the hair from ‘turning back’ is conveyed through a humorous mix of text and soul music, giving a context to the question of self-image for Black women living in a society where beautiful hair is supposedly hair that blows freely in the wind…

B.U.C.K.L.E. Catherine Grund, Julie Tolentino, USA 1994 11mins
A humorous fast-paced parody of women dancing, cruising and picking up women at New York City’s legendary Clit Club.

Bio:
Evan Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle.

Recent exhibitions include A Quiet Violence of Dreams at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town; Okun Song at StudioRCA, London, 2016; All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Embodied Spaces, FramerFramed, De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam – both curated by Christine Eyene, Studio Voltaire OPEN, London, all 2015; and 30 years of the Future, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2014.

Recent performances and screenings include Sticky Black: A Broadcast at Jerwood Space and A Score, A Groove, A Phantom: The Extended Play at Whitstable Biennale 2016. Collaborative projects include Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice and Network11. Ifekoya currently lives and works in London.

*This film has been made with a package of support from BFI, no.w.here and Wellcome Trust as part of the ‘Queering love, Queering hormones’ project and a grant from Heritage Lottery Fund as part of the Rewind/Fast Forward project.