Black Audio Film Collective at PAMM presents a selection of films characterized by an interest in the diasporic African experience, memory, and new modes of representation. This evening, PAMM will screen Handsworth Songs (1986) by John Akomfrah, and the film will be introduced by Yesomi Umolu, Exhibitions Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
On the terrace, check out PAMM Free Community Night: Miami Music Club.
A video-essay on race and civil disorder in the 1980s Britain, Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure the 1985 Handsworth riots—a violent outburst in Birmingham, England, ignited by widespread unemployment and racial tension. The film weaves archival video, photographs, interviews, and footage of the riots to explore the way in which they were an outgrowth of prolonged suppression of black presence by British society.
Yesomi Umolu is Exhibitions Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, where she oversees international contemporary art programming in the Logan Center Gallery and throughout the multidisciplinary art center. Umolu also holds the position of Lecturer in the Humanities division.
Specializing in global contemporary art and spatial practices, Umolu recently curated Kapwani Kiwanga: The sum and its parts (2017) and So-called Utopias (2015) at the Logan Center Gallery. Prior to joining the Logan, Umolu was Assistant Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU where she curated Material Effects: Contemporary Art from West Africa and the Diaspora (2015), John Akomfrah: Imaginary Possessions (2014) and The Land Grant: Forest Law (2014). Umolu was previously Curatorial Fellow for Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis where she curated The Museum of Non Participation: The New Deal (2013). She also held curatorial positions at the European biennial of contemporary art Manifesta 8, region of Murcia, Spain and the Serpentine Gallery, London. She has also contributed to programming at Iniva and Tate Modern, London.
Her writing has appeared in numerous catalogues and journals, including Art in America, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Studio magazine.
Umolu received an MA with honors in Architectural Design from the University of Edinburgh and an MA with Distinction in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London. She is a 2016 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship. Umolu is a member of the board of trustees of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago.
