Artist and curator Barby Asante’s practice focuses on enabling dialogues across cultures. Together with the Curator Teresa Cisneros they provide a space to invite young thinkers to reinterpret, re-perform and reflect, on the subjects of race and identity raised in James Baldwin’s film. The process of research and personal skills development through meeting professionals and visiting sites such as the George Padmore Institute, the Live Art Development Agency and Iniva’s Stuart Hall Library became the backdrop for the making in order to bring the project into the 21st century.
In the 1969 film Baldwin’s Nigger (West Indian Student Centre London, directed by Horace Ove), author James Baldwin and comedian Dick Gregory discuss the black experience in the United States relating it to the Afro-Caribbean experience in Britain.
Baldwin’s provocations in the film highlight the danger in separating identities from their specific histories; universalising experiences leads to erasure and the inability to communicate across difference. The artists aim to reconnect identities and histories to their own experiences, as well as, to challenge attitudes of aloofness surrounding conversations on race.
The project sees the artists and curators cross-generational and individual practices coming together to engage and re-contextualize the film through multidisciplinary artistic approaches.
Through artworks, interventions, performances, DJ sets, workshops and film screenings, the group sets up contemporary conversations that ‘map out’ themes such as identity, race and legacy, allowing a re-animation of histories, through collaborative artistic practices, reimagining the possibilities of tomorrow.