Combahee Experimental: Black Women’s Experimental Filmmaking — Experiments in Narrative

Photo courtesy Garrett Bradley

GARRETT BRADLEY works across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, southern culture, and the history of film in the United States. Bradley has received numerous prizes which include the 2019 Prix de Rome, and the 2017 Sundance Jury Prize for the short film Alone, which was released by The New York Times OpDocs and became an Oscar Contender for short nonfiction filmmaking, included in Academy Shortlist. Bradley’s work can be seen across a variety of spaces including her Second Unit Directing work on Ava DuVernays When They See Us and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In December 2019, Bradley’s first solo exhibition opened at The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), curated by Rebecca Matalon. In January of 2020, Bradley became the first Black American woman to receive Best Director at the 2020 Sundance Film festival for her first feature length documentary, Time.

Read or listen to a recent feature story for New York Times Magazine on Garret Bradley and her work »

Photo courtesy Rungano Nyoni

RUNGANO NYONI is a self-taught Writer/Director. She was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and grew up in Wales, UK. Rungano’s first short film The List won a BAFTA Cymru Award, and her subsequent short film Mwansa the Great was selected for over 100 International Film Festivals and was nominated for a BAFTA Award in 2012. In 2013 Nyoni wrote Z1, which subsequently won Best Short at The British Independent Film Awards. Her short Listen has been nominated for a European Film Award 2015 and won the Best Short Narrative Prize at Tribeca Film Festival. Nyoni’s debut feature was I Am Not a Witch. It follows the story of an eight-year-old girl who is exiled to a Witch Camp. The film premiered in Cannes and was nominated for numerous international awards. In 2018 Nyoni won the BAFTA Award for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer. She also won best director and best debut director at the 2017 British Independent Film Awards. In 2018 she received the Wellcome Trust Fellowship.

Combahee Experimental celebrates the work of Black women filmmakers and their unique cinematic contributions to contemporary visual culture. Co-curated by award-winning multi-media artist Simone Leigh and Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina Campt, the series extends a collaboration begun with the 2018 Loophole of Retreat conference convened at the Guggenheim Museum as a commitment to using public programming platforms to highlight the creative, artistic, and intellectual labor of Black women.

The series looks back while also looking forward to Black women experimental filmmaking from the late seventies to the present day. Its point of departure is a reexamination of the early work of two female members of the influential LA Rebellion movement and the unique cinematic intervention it initiated. It is an intervention that the UCLA Film and Television Archive characterizes as driven by the group’s commitment to a “utopian vision of a better society, their sensitivity to children and gender issues, their willingness to question any and all received wisdom, their identification with the liberation movements in the Third World, and their expression of Black pride and dignity.”

Photo courtesy Tina Campt

TINA CAMPT is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of three books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), and Listening to Images (2017). Her forthcoming book, A Black Gaze, will be published by MIT Press in 2021.

Photo by Paul Mpagi Sepuya

SIMONE LEIGH’s practice incorporates sculpture, video, and installation; all are informed by her ongoing exploration of Black female-identified subjectivity. Leigh works in a mode she describes as auto-ethnographic. Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art; her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination comingle. Through her investigations of visual overlaps between cultures, time periods, and geographies, she confronts and examines ideas of the female body, race, beauty, and community. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant (2018), Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2017), John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), and Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2016). Recent projects and exhibitions include: Simone Leigh (2020) at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; Whitney Biennial (2019) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Trigger: Gender as a Tool and as a Weapon (2017) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Psychic Friends Network (2016) at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London; The Waiting Room (2016) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014), a project commissioned by Creative Time; inHarlem, a public installation presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem at Marcus Garvey Park, New York; and a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Leigh’s work was featured in Loophole of Retreat, a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, to commemorate her achievements as the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize 2018. Leigh is the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth, where she presents a new monumental sculpture that started in April 2019.