Pérez Art Museum Miami and Miami Beach Cinematheque at Historic City Hall present a film program curated and introduced by artist Bouchra Khalili.
Bouchra Khalili (b. 1975) currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work employs a mode of poetic documentation to investigate discourses and strategies of resistance as elaborated and narrated by members of minority communities. In addition to exhibiting her own work internationally, including her current participation in the exhibition at the Central Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale, Khalili is a founding member and film curator of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, in Tangiers, Morocco.
For this program, Khalili has selected two films by African filmmakers which constitute seminal works questioning self-representation. These films by pioneering Senegalese directors portray the point of view of colonized migrants, subverting dominant Eurocentric post-colonial narratives.
- Black Girl. Directed by Ousmane Sembene. 1966. 65 min. French with English subtitles.
In Black Girl, Senegalese novelist and director, Ousmane Sembene, often hailed as the “father of African film,” tells the heart-rending story of a Senegalese servant, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop). Traversing Dakar and the French Riviera, the film’s revolutionary perspective focuses on the individual dreams, desires, and struggles of Diouana. These experiences are set against those of her callous French employers, a couple referred to only as Madame and Monsieur, who react to the decline of their once secure social positions, in both locales. In the context of Senegal’s recent independence (1960), shifting post-colonial economics, identities, and power dynamics come to light through this emotionally and visually compelling drama.
- Afrique sur Seine. Directed by Mamadou Sarr, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. 1955. 22 min. French with English subtitles.
While Africans were banned from making films in the French colonies prior to independence, Mamadou Sarr and Paulin Soumanou Vieyra were granted permission to shoot Afrique sur Seine, in Paris. Both were members of the “African Cinema Group,” producing films in a colonial era as a gesture of resistance. Afrique sur Seine focuses on a community of Africans living in Paris, observing French society as colonial ethnographers had observed Africa, reversing the perspective, and “decolonizing” their look and their mind.
This screening is part of a series of public programs that contextualizes the work of artists who have been commissioned to create new projects that will debut with the opening of Pérez Art Museum Miami in December 2013. Khalili has been invited to create a new video work based on research undertaken in New York.
