An evening of screenings and discussion by artists and filmmakers who have different approaches to collaborative production.
Featuring Ed Webb-Ingall, Beverley Bennett, Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah, each artist will present a recent short film which speaks to the process of working collectively, followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Alex Thorp, Education Curator, Serpentine.
Ed Webb-Ingall, A Bedroom for Everyone, 2023, 15 minutes
A Bedroom for Everyone is a new animated film by filmmaker Ed Webb-Ingall. The project explores the power of grassroots activism and organising in the face of the current housing crisis in the UK, and portrays the camaraderie that unfolds in the community centres and meeting halls where this work takes place. Webb-Ingall’s film draws from conversations with many groups across the UK, including from a series of workshops with parents and workers at the Portman Early Childhood Centre in collaboration with Shelter and Serpentine Education.
Beverley Bennett, Nation’s Finest, Putting Down Roots and Birthing, 2022, 12 minutes
Rooted in Beverley Bennett’s home region of the Midlands, the artist-filmmaker pays homage to the pioneering BLK Art Group and its legacy and influence on the art scene and her practice more personally. Feeding into the film are a series of intergenerational community gatherings, bringing local groups together to discuss themes around Commonwealth, colonialism and race, intersecting with the work and archive of the BLK Art Group. These groups, the discourse and ideas generated are a catalyst to support and inform the narrative for the film.
Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah, I Carry It With Me Everywhere, 2022, 18 minutes
Informed by interviews with first-generation migrants living in the borough of Brent and beyond, this short film by Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah weaves together the lives of multiple characters as they confront inherited ideas of belonging. From the severed connection to a motherland following the death of a parent, to the generational experience of displacement, to nostalgia for a place and time forever out of reach, I Carry It With Me Everywhere explores how migration results in moments of rupture from which new understandings of home and belonging may emerge.
Curated by
Alex Thorp Curator, Education
Jemma Egan Assistant Curator Education
Kostas Stasinopoulos, Curator, Live Programmes
Produced by
Isobel Peyton Jones
Artist Bios
Ed Webb-Ingall is a filmmaker and researcher working with archival materials and methodologies drawn from community video. He collaborates with groups to explore under-represented historical moments and their relationship to contemporary life, developing modes of self-representation specific to the subject or the experiences of the participants. He is a co-founder of The London Community Video Archive and is currently writing a book with the title BFI Screen Stories: The Story of Video Activism. Previous solo exhibitions have been at The Showroom Gallery (2015), Focal Point (2018), South London Gallery (2019), and Grand Union (2023). Group exhibitions include MK Gallery (2019), Invisible Dust (2019) and Brent Biennial (2022).
Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah are a filmmaking duo who share a dedication to examining race, migration and the ongoing legacies of colonialism through film. Their latest film And still, it remains explores toxic colonialism in Algeria and is screening from September 2023 at LUX in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival. Together, Aburawa and Shah co-founded Other Cinemas, an award-winning project dedicated to supporting the work of Black and non-white filmmakers through free community screenings and a year-long film school.
Beverley Bennett is an artist-filmmaker whose work revolves around the possibilities of drawing, performance and collaborative experiments with sound. Her practice is connected to multiple ways of making. The first of these is a concern with the importance of sound in art, the second is an investigation into the idea of The Archive and the third is collaboration. Through socially political work with other creatives, fine artists, community members, young children, and their families, Bennett’s practice frequently provides spaces for participants to become collaborators. She provides a point of focus from where to unpack ideas around what constitutes an art practice and for whom art is generated.
