Screening Black Threads: Short Films in Dialogue Grace Ndiritu, Onyeka Igwe and Juliana Kasumu

The programme features three short films: two from artists that are within iniva’s Moving Image Collection and one film that was commissioned as part of the BFI National Archive project ‘Our Screen Heritage’.

Still Life – Green Textile by Grace Ndiritu and We Need Names by Onyeka Igwe will be shown in conversation with Threads of a Memory by Juliana Kasumu, a poetic film exploring the interlacing of heritage, womanhood, and remembrance. 

Following the screenings, Juliana Kasumu will be in conversation with Tavian Hunter, offering insights into the creative process, the politics of cultural memory, and the power of visual storytelling to connect past and present. 

This event is co-presented by Serendipity – Institute for Black Arts and Heritage as part of their Digital Blackcentric Week and iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), continuing its commitment to platforming artists and filmmakers whose work reimagines identity, culture, and belonging through contemporary visual practice. 

This event is happening with the support of BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding. 

The Films

Still Life – Green Textile, Dir. Grace Ndritu, UK, 2007, 5 min  

Still Life: Green Textiles is one of the four videos that use West African textiles in a sensual and, at times, unnerving physical performance by the artist to camera. Ndiritu wraps, conceals and reveals her body, creating and controlling tensions within the fabric to provoke different emotional responses. 

We Need New Names, Dir. Onyeka Igwe, UK, 2015, 14 min, Doc/Video

Essay We Need New Names is an essay video work examining contemporary Nigerian diasporic female identity through the contradictions inherent to an ethnographic reading of the funeral of the filmmakers’ family matriarch. Using personal archive to explore the concepts of female identity, diaspora, cultural memory and most importantly ‘fiction’.

Threads of Memory, Dir. Juliana Kasumu, UK 2025, 17 minutes
Unravelling the enduring influence of West African and Caribbean cultural memory on Black British fashion, Threads of Memory explores how migration, identity and resilience alongside an ever-expanding style and social exchange via moving image, shaped the evolution of a fashion movement that redefines authenticity and challenges stereotypes.

About Artists

Grace Ndiritu 

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan (Maasai Kikuyu) artist born in 1982. Concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world, Ndiritu works across film, painting, textiles, performance and social practice.  

Ndiritu is a recipient of the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation – Visual Arts Award (2024). Her films and videos, textiles, photography, performances, paintings and architectural installations have been widely exhibited, most recently, in her mid-career survey entitled Healing The Museum at SMAK, Ghent in 2023. 

Her films Black Beauty and Becoming Plant have been selected for prestigious film festivals including 72nd Berlinale (2022) FIDMarseille (2021) and BFI London Film Festival (2022). She is a member of BAFTA and also the winner of the Jarman Award in association with Film London (2022). 

Onyeka Igwe

Onyeka Igwe is a London-born & based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound.

Onyeka’s video works have been screened at Modern Mondays, MoMA, Artists’ Film Club: Black Radical Imagination, ICA, London, 2017; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2020, and at film festivals internationally including the London Film Festival, 2015 and 2020; Open City Documentary Film Festival 2021 and 2022, Rotterdam International, Netherlands, 2018, 2019 and 2020; Edinburgh Artist Moving Image, 2016; Images Festival, Canada, 2019, and the Smithsonian African American film festival, USA, 2018.

Juliana Kasumu

Juliana Kasumu is a British-Nigerian artist and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice spans film, photography, and installation. Through fragmented, non-linear storytelling, she explores identity, memory, and diasporic experience. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Rencontres de Bamako Biennale, Getty Images Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her installation, What Does the Water Taste Like? was featured in the 2022 London Open at Whitechapel Gallery and won the 2021 Aesthetica Emerging Art Prize.

Kasumu’s award-winning short BABYBANGZ premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, earning the Grand Jury Prize at AFI Fest and multiple festival awards. Other works include Losing Joy, which screened at BFI Flare and Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Adura Baba Mi, which premiered at Camden International Film Festival and was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival.

Image Credit: Film Still from Still Life - Green Textile