Is My Living In Vain is the title given by Ufuoma Essi to her first solo exhibition in France. The British artist, whose work mainly takes the form of video, film, photography and sound, invites visitors to the Magasin CNAC to take part in an immersive installation with a religious atmosphere, dedicated to his eponymous film, his most recent and most ambitious to date.
Curation Céline Kopp
Is My Living In Vain looks at the history and emancipatory potential of the black church as a space for belonging, affirmation and collective organisation in the diaspora. Archival footage, oral histories and footage shot between Philadelphia and London are superimposed on the screen in a tangled thread of personal and shared memories. The film celebrates the performativity of black bodies in congregational spaces and examines the sonic, political, spiritual and existential links between two communities separated by the Atlantic.
Begun in 2017, while the artist was living in Philadelphia, this project emerged from an ongoing research into the histories of performance across the Black Atlantic (a term borrowed from author Paul Gilroy). In it, Ufuoma Essi transcribes her view of the rituality of black church gatherings across South London, where she was born and raised, and West Philadelphia, where she found her calling as a filmmaker.
This solo exhibition continues and builds on themes that the artist addresses in the film All That You Can't Leave Behind (2019), exhibited at Le Magasin in La Position de l'Amour, where collective experience and song emerge as modes of resistance and reparation in the history of black feminism.
About the artist
Born in Lewisham, South East London in 1995, Ufuoma Essi is a video artist and filmmaker. She works mainly with film and the moving image, as well as photography and sound. Archives are an essential source for her, and it is by exploring them that the artist aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps in political and historical narratives. Using archives as a process of unlearning and discovery, she seeks to refocus the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and the specific histories of black women.