Screenings
School of Abolition Screening Programme
Across the course of the project we presented a programme of artist film and moving-image works at Springburn Community Auditorium and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow that focused on protest, dissent, and freedom of expression as fundamental human rights.
Though approached from distinct positions both geographically and socially, the three works in the programme all explore the capacity of cultural life to gestate and generate new ways of enacting activism, solidarity, and collective liberation.
Holding the Line | Screening & Performance with Alberta Whittle & The Joyous Choir
Holding the Line: a refrain in two parts is a film by Alberta Whittle that examines the conflicting act of holding. The film includes footage taken from body cameras and mobile phones during racialised and hostile police stop and searches. It combines footage of Black Lives Matter protesters in active resistance to state-sanctioned harm and carceral systems of abuse that preserve white supremacist and neo-colonial ideologies.
The screening was followed by a performance by Maryhill Integration Network’s Joyous Choir. In the spirit of Holding the Line's attentiveness to collective voices; singing, chanting, protesting, lamenting, the choir performed songs from the Underground Railroad—songs which were coded with hidden messages for the runaway slaves seeking freedom—alongside original songs on solidarity, freedom, and resisting the Hostile Environment written collectively by the choir.
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Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher, and curator. She was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. Alberta is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh College of Art and is a Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. She was a RAW Academie Fellow at RAW Material in Dakar in 2018 and is the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/9.
Her creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture, and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces.
Maryhill Integration Network (MIN) brings refugee, migrant, and local communities together through art, social, cultural, and educational groups and projects, offering people a chance to learn new skills, meet new people, share experiences and take part in worthwhile activities to improve their lives and the life of their communities. The Joyous Choir is MIN’s community choir, they use singing as an inclusive and enjoyable activity that celebrates the richness that New Scots bring to Scotland’s artistic landscape and cultural life. Since 2013, the group has used singing to support social inclusion, diversity, and empowerment in a welcoming and creative space.
Tania Libre | Screening
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression. Their conversations expose an intimate yet profound analysis of Cuba, surveillance and the politics of repression embedded in government and family structures.
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Lynn Hershman Leeson is an artist and filmmaker internationally renowned for her pioneering use of new technologies that explore key social issues. Her prolific body of work spans over four decades: from her early conceptual and performance works where she constructed an ‘official’ civilian record for her alter ego Roberta Breitmore, to her more recent works that intersect with the field of science to explore themes of identity, privacy, surveillance and the complex relationship between humans and technology, and the real and the virtual world. Hershman Leeson also addresses these key themes through her filmmaking, which is highly idiosyncratic and socially engaged. A notable example is her acclaimed documentary ! Women Art Revolution, which focuses on the Feminist movement in the USA.
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban artist and activist living between New York and Havana. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions and her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana. Bruguera's work pivots around issues of power and control, and several of her works interrogate and re-present events in Cuban history. As a result of her art actions and activism, Bruguera has been arrested and jailed several times.
Bring Down The Walls | Screening & Discussion with Thomas Abercromby & Phil Collins
Following a public screening of his film Bring Down the Walls, artist and film-maker Phil Collins was joined by School of Abolition curator Thomas Abercromby for a conversation exploring the resonances between Bring Down The Walls and the wider work of the School of Abolition project.
Over the last four decades the prison population in the US has soared to more than 2 million.Through privatisation and disproportionate targeting of people of colour, the marginalised and the poor, the justice system has been used as a tool of oppression and the source of corporate profit. Today, ‘the land of the free’ is the world’s biggest jailer. Coinciding with the escalation of mass incarceration in the 1980s, a new dance culture emerged from Black, Latinx and queer communities embattled by the criminal and law enforcement policies.
Bring Down The Walls looks at the US prison industrial complex through the lens of house music and nightlife. The connection between a system that locks the body up and music that sets it free comes from the years in which the director Phil Collins worked with a group of men incarcerated at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. After access was revoked, he recorded a compilation of house classics with vocalists who have formerly been incarcerated, and in 2018 set up a communal space in the heart of Manhattan’s court district dedicated to the struggle for social justice and prison abolition. During the day, discussions were led by people who have been directly impacted by the system, and those working to radically change or abolish it. At night, the space transformed into a dance party hosted by collectives from New York City’s vibrant club scene.
Bringing these strands together, Bring Down The Walls reflects a coexistence of two fields of knowledge, the political/academic and the physical/experiential—one born out of education, advocacy, and activism, the other through sharing time, space, and energy— proposing the dance floor as a site of personal and collective liberation, and new ways in which we could come together as a society.
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Phil Collins is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Berlin and Wuppertal, Germany. He is Professor of Video and Performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Over the last two decades Collins has gained recognition for ambitious projects which explore the intersections of art, politics and popular culture. Manifesting as films, installations, performative situations and live events, his work foregrounds the aspects of lived experience, the radical potential of empathy and connection, and voices that have often been disregarded or suppressed. Across geographies, ethnicities, languages and social classes, Collins’ approach is guided by a commitment to long-term process and engagement with the local context. Over the years his collaborators have included, amongst others, the youth of Baghdad, Kosovan-Albanian refugees, Palestinian disco dancers, friends and lovers in Belgrade, protagonists of Turkish and British reality TV, the homeless population of Cologne, the stars of Mexican telenovelas, teachers of Marxism-Leninism from the former German Democratic Republic, men incarcerated in one of the United States' largest maximum security facilities, and prisoners, pensioners, school kids, and a symphonic orchestra in Glasgow. Reflecting critical consciousness and disarming immediacy, Collins’ works pull into sharp focus the contradictions which shape our relationships with one another.