Films that tackle the issues behind the Black Live Matter movement are being screened online in a five-day-long mini film festival (27-31 October). The programme has been organised by Goodman Gallery as part of its latest London exhibition Living Just Enough (until 19 November), which it says “seeks to acknowledge and contextualise the current global reckoning with white supremacy”. Each selection of videos is available for only 24 hours through the gallery’s website.
The show and the video programme “features work by artists of varying generations who respond to these conditions from historic perspectives and in relation to the current global moment—a state of deepened rupture exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic,” a statement says. Artists included in the group show include Sonia Boyce, Arthur Jafa, Faith Ringgold, Hank Willis Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems. Goodman Gallery is donating 10% of sales to Black Lives Matter and Johannesburg’s Witkoppen Clinic.
The Art Newspaper has partnered with Goodman Gallery to exclusively release Yinka Shonibare’s film Addio Del Passato (2011) 24 hours early to our readers. The video continues the artist’s explorations of the British Empire and, in particular, Lord Nelson—the figurehead who led the colonial power at its height. The title of the film—Italian for “so closes my sad story”—is taken from the eponymous aria in the last act of Verdi’s 1853 opera La Traviata. In the original opera, the heroine Violetta sings in anguish about her impending death from tuberculosis having only just fallen in love. In Shonibare’s version, he replaces Violetta with the character of Lord Nelson’s estranged wife Frances Nisbet, who he betrayed with his mistress Lady Hamilton. Shonibare’s film draws out the parallels in the feelings of loss and yearning between these two female figures. Shonibare’s lead actress has been “blind cast” (casting without considering the actor’s ethnicity, skin colour or gender). Nisbet repeats her lament three times with subtle variations in staging spiced with watery images of Nelson with his consort, Lady Hamilton.
