About
About the Curator & Artist Talk
Beyond the Sky: A Conversation with Leila Weefur, Lebohang Kganye and Yo-Yo Gonthier, moderated by Yomna Osman
Beyond the Sky is a presentation of 4 short films from a selection of contemporary African filmmakers. In this collection, each film moves seamlessly between the personal and metaphysical, connecting cinematic voices across the different regions of Africa. Finding comfort floating in uncertainty, these filmmakers pose questions — some obvious, some hidden — in an attempt at guiding us toward futurity. While maintaining allegiance to specific regional traditions, the images presented in this series reframe traditional African images into a new digital vernacular. This series of moving images suspends you in a space that conjures personal memories and locates a common language in digital gestures.
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Leila Weefur
Leila Weefur (He/They/She) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Through video and installation, their interdisciplinary practice examines the performativity intrinsic to systems of belonging. The work brings together concepts of sensorial memory, abject Blackness, hyper surveillance, and the erotic. Weefur is a recipient of the Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund and the MSP California Black Voices Project. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including The Wattis Institute, McEvoy Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, SFMOMA, Museum of the African Diaspora, and Smack Mellon. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is a lecturer at Stanford University.
Lebohange Kganye
Lebohang Kganye primarily known for her photography, Kganye often incorporates the archival and performative into a practice that centers storytelling and memory as it plays itself out in the familial experience. Her interest in the materiality of photography is ongoing and explored in a myriad of ways, through her use of the sculptural, performative and the moving image. (Image credit: Audoin Desforges)
Yoyo Gonthier, artiste photographe plasticien chez lui.
Born in 1974 in Niamey, Niger, Yo-Yo Gonthier works and lives in Marquefave, France. His artistic research is freely inspired by the exploration: quests, discoveries and travels that are as much concrete as they are fantasised. By means of film, drawing, engraving, photography and performance, he invites us to a historical reading of forms and universal matters. As a visual artist, Yo-Yo Gonthier interrogates the deletion of memory in an occidental society where speed, technology and progress seem to have become essential values. (Image credit: Matthieu Rondel)
Yomna Osman
Yomna Osman (Egypt, 1990) is a curator, writer, and researcher based between California and Cairo. Her research interest lies in the intersection of forced-migration, gentrification, and power dynamics. Her ongoing research investigates contemporary post-conflict landscapes. She is particularly interested in archival and research-based transdisciplinary practices, with an emphasis on de-colonial and speculative discourses. Osman has held curatorial positions at The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; KADIST, San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ArteEast, New York, among others. She has curated exhibitions, performances, and screenings at various institutions and edited several books. She holds a BA from the American University in Cairo in International and Public Law; and a dual MA from the California College of Arts in Curatorial Practice and Visual Criticism.
ABOUT THE FILMS
Lebohang Kganye
Ke sale teng 2017, animated film, 3’22’’, courtesy of the artist, Johannesburg
This project is an excavation of my family history through family albums. Sometimes we rely on the family photo album as a way to understand what family is meant to be. What we often end up with is a grouping of images that have been constructed, and perhaps do not account at all for the histories and memories that are connected with that album. I am not suggesting that these photo albums are a lie but that they present a challenge of how we read into them. My work begins with my own family album and questions what has been omitted from this album, what memories are not been translated through the pictures, what role does a family photo album play in the present?
Family photographs are more than just a documentation of events that have occurred, it is a space for us to project what we can recall and perhaps a space to question and invent a new history per se. I am interested in how albums no longer have a fixed narrative but instead open us to reinterpret our past and perhaps this kind of reinterpretation, questions why we find family albums so important or perhaps we do not.
The more I researched my family history, it became apparent that family history remains a space of contradictions, it is a mixture of truth and fiction. Photo albums are arranged as if to tell life stories and testimonies and build identities, however the image is never ‘complete’ we are only presented with visual clues that allows our own imaginaries to further ‘complete’ the story.
More so in my exploration of my family album, I begin to find myself as an outsider trying to construct an archive, by rearranging images to complete a story, truth or fiction. Such archives do not reveal easy answers, for me it reveals that time can break apart and reconnect and not quite fit back into one another.
Yo-Yo Gonthier
BUREY BAMBATA (De grands clouds / The great clouds ) 2019, super 8 film, B&W, sound, 13’10, France, Niger
Burey Bambata, (The Great Clouds) is a collective ode to be revered. Yo-Yo Gonthier chooses the Cloud as the protagonist of the video. The Cloud is this sculpture of several meters of fabric created in 2013 and reactivated several times during performances around the world, from Dakar to Niamey via Reunion Island and Abidjan. In this video, a visual epic shot with the Super 8 camera, Yo-Yo Gonthier brings together the whimsical dreams of an artist as a brilliant inventor and the semantic richness rooted in the history of vernacular customs that touch both the artist’s personal history and that of a part of Africa.
A group of men, women and children have gathered under the Cloud. They carry it over their heads, forming a single hybrid being with the sculpture. A procession to the Niamey River begins. It crosses inspiring landscapes of calm, closely linked to imaginary worlds, but whose real character is sometimes doubted: the image generated by the Super 8 camera has here the quilted texture of a dream. The image often creates a tension between the feeling of a movement – the Cloud that crosses the image for example – and the steadiness of the framing, whose aim is literally to frame part of the landscape; where a more traditional shot could have chosen to accompany the movement of the procession. Through this choice, Yo-Yo Gonthier forces us to break with our habits of image consumption.
Through dazzling plays of light, the Niamey River and its other banks are the final destination. Yet the subject of the work is indeed that of a quest, of a collective journey. The activation of a performance-procession is a pretext to gather, to celebrate while having fun, to marvel; and finally, to allow oneself to dream and question together. Here, the artist is an inventor-storyteller, inventor of hybrid objects, storyteller of stories that make people dream. Yo-Yo Gonthier’s aesthetics is an aesthetics of nuanced materials: declination of grey, slightly blurred images, voices whose bodies are absent from the image. It’s an in-between aesthetic. It evolves at the crossroads of worlds – plastic, historical, geographical and dreamlike. The poetic-political challenge of Yo-Yo Gonthier’s work is then to be read: to anchor oneself in a land rich in everything to be able to rise, rewrite and invent oneself better. From his works as visual manifestos, Yo-Yo Gonthier inspires us to shape new collective horizons.
This program is presented in conjunction with the film exhibition Beyond the Sky, on view at MoAD through February 27, 2022.
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