The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and LUX Scotland partnered with the British Council to produce a series of short and experimental films that coincides with the exhibition “We Suffer to Remain”. The series highlights a history of moving image expression of hard to have conversations about race, indigeneity and belonging.
The NAGB, in collaboration with LUX Scotland, has put together some really incredible content for our series of film screenings as part of the programming for our current exhibition in partnership with the British Council, “We Suffer To Remain”. Moving image has impacted us so greatly as a region in terms of shaping our narratives, and in how we decolonise and re-shape those narratives for ourselves. The first programme in the series of screenings, titled “One Turn of the Revolution”, featured artwork by the lauded Black Audio Film Collective and Barbadian-born, Glasgow-based Alberta Whittle, dealing with issues around migration and the post-colonial in Britain and in former colonies. Programme II, “Poetics of the Undercommons” will be on view at the NAGB on June 14th.
Dr Ian Bethell Bennett
Sorry, Not Sorry a short experimental film by Alberta Whittle juxtaposes tourism and post-enslavement-dispossession in the British Caribbean. An intriguing mise-en-scène combined with sharp overlaying and interweaving text, image, audio and nuance that brings all sorts of feelings to the fore, from contradictions to harmonies. The harmony in the background, though clashes with the discordant foreground that allows the moving image the salience it has to document, to articulate, to illustrate the unbecoming side of colonialism and independence. Again, the irony of postcolonial independence is that there is no real sovereignty as governments are only held in power by foreign direct investors who own the economy, by owning resorts where the Bacardi-sipping-frolicking-lithe bodies stay during their fantasy time in paradise.