Artists’ Film Club: Avant-Noir, Volume 2 curated by Greg de Cuir, Jr

Avant-Noir surveys contemporary work by moving image artists about African and African diaspora cultures. It is rare that we see Black bodies on screens at film festivals and exhibitions, perhaps even more rare when those images are created by Black artists.

Avant-Noir takes this state of affairs into account and offers unique visions of the international Black experience while celebrating the presence of artists who are often excluded from elite institutions and the dominant discourses on cinema and the visual arts. However, these politics of representation remain implicit in the body of the program – the explicit content reveals a virtuosity of picture and sound combinations in a variety of techniques that render a provocative impression of living while Black at the dawn of the 21st century.

This event is curated by Greg de Cuir, Jr.

Programme

• My Only Idol is Reality, Martine Syms, 2007, Video, Colour, Sound, 7 min.
• Bird’s Milk, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2009, Video, Colour, Sound, 6 min.
• Ditch Plains, Loretta Fahrenholz, 2013, Video, Colour, Sound, 30 min.
• Nice Baskets, Luther Price, 2006, Film, Colour, Sound, 8 min.
• Kuhani, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, 2013, Video, Color, Sound, 7 min.
• Short History of Abandoned Sets, Rä di Martino, 2012, Video, Colour, Sound, 8 min.
• Songs for Earth & Folk, Cauleen Smith, 2013, Film, Colour, Sound, 11 min.  

Greg de Cuir, Jr is the selector/curator for Alternative Film/Video Belgrade (Serbia). Moving image programs he has curated include Alternative Film/Video for Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (Poland), Avant-Noir for ICA Artists’ Film Biennial London (United Kingdom), Academic Ciné-club Belgrade 1960-1980 for Los Angeles Filmforum (United States), How to Speak About Pre-/Pro-/Anti-/Post-Yugoslav Cinema for Spencer Museum of Art (United States), Postsocialism Revisited for goEast Wiesbaden (Germany) and L’Alternativa Barcelona (Spain). His writing has been published in Cineaste, Jump Cut, Festivalists, Art Margins and other journals and volumes. De Cuir received his DPhil from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at University of Arts Belgrade in 2012. He lives and works in Belgrade as an independent curator, writer and translator.

Avant-Noir was first presented at the ICA's Artists’ Film Biennial 2014. Volume 2 continues the work of highlighting alternative images of Blackness in new film and video practices.