Community Media Center
2022-2023 Aliveness
Location: Express Newark, 54 Halsey Street 2nd Floor, Newark, NJ, 07102
On View: 2.03.23 – 7.31.23
Things We Do in the Dark: Cinematic Experiments in Kinship showcases over twenty video-based works by Black and Indigenous artists who engage experimental, collaborative, and political approaches to contemporary filmmaking. Curated by scholar, activist, and cultural worker Farrah Rahaman of the acclaimed BlackStar Film Festival, these works explore such critical themes as racial solidarity, Black radical protest, and communal healing. The works were created in what Rahaman describes as “cinematic ensembles” and by community-oriented artists, collectives, and groups that foreground practices of collective care and kinship. Often situated within community media and learning settings, these ensembles invoke poetry, music, and intergenerational storytelling as a creative practice that expands independent forms of cinema into collective imaginings of liberation and resistance.
Taking its title from poet June Jordan’s lyrical “These Poems,” this exhibition reimagines Express Newark as a series of micro-cinemas in which audiences are encouraged to slip into our “darker spaces” in order to reflect and find respite.
As part of her 2022-2023 curator-in-residence at Express Newark, Rahaman has scheduled this show in two parts. The first curated selection of video works traces lineages of resistance in eruptive, celebratory, and intimate ways. The films protest the legacies of racial capitalism and violence by highlighting an ongoing commitment to gathering, survival, and existence on a more vibrant register. The second rotation moves toward a speculative and experimental viewing experience that asks audience members to venture into a space of not knowing. Emboldened by the communal process and a collective sensibility, the films envision new worlds and ways of being—for both Black and Indigenous communities.
Farrah Rahaman’s residency is supported by filmmaker Yvonne Michelle Shirley, the director of the Community Media Center at Express Newark and a member of the film collective New Negress Film Society.
