Jerwood Lates: Towards a Black Testimony with Languid Hands

About

Languid Hands present an intimate, drop-in programme of performance, discussion, listening and reading responding to their work Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer, Protest, Peace commissioned for Jerwood Collaborate!. 

This new single screen moving image work, considers the ontological status of Black people as objects, commodities, and as raw material. Referencing seminal black texts and artefacts alongside instances of contemporary anti-black violence, this work examines testimony as obscured, ignored and undermined.

Format

5-6pm – The bar will be open for refreshments throughout the evening and there will be the opportunity to purchase new pamphlet Objects Who Testify by Imani Robinson published by PSS for Boundary + Gesture curated by Taylor Le Melle at Wysing Arts Centre.

6-7pm – Listening party of the album Max Roach, We Insist! (1960).

7-8pm – A programme of live readings with guest performers Christopher Kirubi, Chloe Filani and Derica Shields.

Christopher Kirubi is a London-based poet and artist who uses the mutability and promiscuity of images, objects and text to negotiate the limits of sexuality, gender, race and desire.

Chloe Filani is a Black feminist, Poet, Performance artist, public Speaker and workshop facilitator. Her poetry works on her lived experiences and the broader themes of identity and power structures. Dealing with ideas of precolonial African trans femme ancestors in poetic story telling.

Derica Shields is a writer, researcher and cultural worker from London. As part of a 2017 Triple Canopy commission, she is completing a multi-format oral history project centering on Black people’s accounts of the UK welfare state. Her book project commissioned by Hannah Black is forthcoming from Book Works in 2020.