Tanoa Sasraku: O' Pierrot

About

Through the narrative of Pierrot the Clown, and the aesthetic of Kenneth Anger’s pioneering avant-garde, queer film Rabbit’s Moon, Tanoa Sasraku’s 2019 film O’ Pierrot explores the quest for British acceptance from a black British perspective.

Tanoa Sasraku’s practice shifts between sculpture, drawing, print and filmmaking. Her stitched and torn newsprint works are inspired by the Fante Asafo flags of coastal Ghana and geometric forms found in Tartan cloth, towers and pinnacles of rock. Her own banners map personal stories of a life lived in modern Britain, as newsprint, pigment and basic craft processes bind together to create cryptic, ceremonial objects. In her practice as a filmmaker, Sasraku engages in retellings of traditional folklore from a black and lesbian perspective, as well as producing more diaristic journeys through her past, via the medium of analogue film.

This exhibition is made possible by public funding from The National Lottery through Arts Council England.