Serpentine Cinema presents An Evening with Ja’Tovia Gary, accompanied by a conversation between Ja’Tovia Gary and Derica Shields.
Artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary employs an intersectional Black feminist approach to documentary film and experimental video art to address themes of representation, race, gender, sexuality and violence. The three films in this series—The Giverny Document (2019), An Ecstatic Experience (2015) and Quiet As It’s Kept (2023)—blend animation, interviews, archival materials, and montage editing techniques. By weaving historical and contemporary elements together, Gary uses varied cinematic techniques to activate re-memory and restoration.
An Ecstatic Experience is described as ‘a meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.’ In this work, Gary questions how we respond to and understand interconnected historical moments, using ecstasy as a tool to reclaim lost and silenced histories. Quiet As It’s Kept was created as a response to Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, about Black American girlhood. Gary adds contemporary texture to the novel’s memory by combining traditional documentary filmmaking techniques with animation, viral social media clips, pop culture, and conversations that engage with Morrison’s work on academic and spiritual levels. In The Giverny Document, filmed on location in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny and Harlem, New York, Gary asks Black women walking on the streets of Harlem, “Do you feel safe in your body?” The tension of this question is intensified by collaging elements, such as the harrowing video of Diamond Reynolds, moments after her boyfriend, Philando Castile, was murdered by police.
Presented as a programme for the first time in the UK, against a backdrop of growing far-right sentiment in Europe, and the continent’s history of racial abuse at home and abroad, the films in An Evening with Ja’Tovia Gary resonate across borders to surpass temporal and spatial boundaries.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Ja’Tovia Gary and Derica Shields.
Presented in collaboration with Institut Français du Royaume-Uni with support from Paula Cooper Gallery.
BSL interpretation is available on request. Please get in touch at [email protected].
BIOS
Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity and employs rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her multivalent work.
Derica Shields is a writer and editor from South London working across disciplines with a particular focus on Black aesthetics, cultures and epistemologies. Her criticism and essays have appeared in Art Review, Frieze, Flash Art, Girls Like Us, and in catalogues and gallery publications. She is a former contributing editor at the New Inquiry and LIES journal, and former Features Editor at Rookie.
Curated by Kostas Stasinopoulos, Curator, Live Programmes, Serpentine; Lewis Dalton Gilbert, Creative Director, Vibe Called Tech; and Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes, Serpentine. Produced by Isobel Peyton-Jones.
