Combahee Experimental: Black Women’s Experimental Filmmaking — The Black Surreal

Photo courtesy Nuotama Frances Bodomo

NUOTAMA FRANCES BODOMO is a Ghanaian filmmaker based in New York City. Her award-winning short films Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) and Everybody Dies! (2016) have played at festivals including Sundance, the Berlinale, Telluride, Rotterdam, SXSW, and New Directors/New Films. Afronauts was exhibited at the Whitney Museum as part of the group show Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016, at the Barbican Centre as part of Into The Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction, and at the 2018 Venice Biennale Architecture (US Pavilion) as part of Dimensions of Citizenship. Nuotama recently served as staff writer & director on the first season of Random Acts of Flyness (HBO). She is currently in Zambia developing the feature film version of Afronauts.

Photo courtesy Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich

MADELEINE HUNT EHRLICH is a filmmaker and artist who has completed projects in Kingston, Jamaica, Miami, Florida and extensively in the five boroughs of New York City. Her work has screened all over the world including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and in Film Festivals such as New Orleans Film Festival, Doclisboa and Blackstar Film Festival. She has been featured in Essence Magazine, Studio Museum’s Studio Magazine, ARC Magazine, BOMBLOG, and Guernica Magazine, Small Axe journal among others. She is the recipient of a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO fellowship and grant, a 2015 TFI ESPN Future Filmmaker Award and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film. Her work has been recognized by the Time Inc. Black Girl Magic Emerging Director’s series, the National Magazine (ELLIE) Awards, and she has received grants from the National Black Programming Consortium and Glassbreaker Films. Madeleine has a degree in Film and Photography from Hampshire College and has an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in film and television production at CUNY – Queens College in New York City.

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.