In Conversation with Christopher J. Harris

Info

Join us for a talk by artist-filmmaker Christopher J. Harris on July 26th @ 6pm! Journeying through his eclectic Black cinema influences (Edward Owens, Mike Henderson, Ulysses Jenkins, Betye Saar and more), Chris will explore his personal and evolving relationship to the aesthetics of the Black analogue image. The talk will be followed by a discussion with not/nowhere workers.

Christopher’s work leans into the sensorial power of analogue cinema, using silence and stillness as a mode of being with the ruins and contradictions of history and social life. Re-materialising African American history through this method, his films are an inspiring experiment for those interested in interrupting racial discourses through the Black cinematic imagination, resisting the depleting effects of racial domination past and present. We’re excited to explore the relationships, thinking, methods, processes and aesthetics that have informed his body of work!

Christopher J. Harris makes films and videos installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video, among other strategies. Working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films, like the music from which they take inspiration, embody the existential complexities and paradoxes of racialized identity in the U.S.

Concession Tickets available for 10£, Please click the Request Concession Button !

Portrait of Christopher J. Harris by Daniel Owusu