theVOV – Collective Intimacy: Reviving a Live Programme

theVOV 3D rendering, Thick/er Black Lines (Rianna Jade Parker & Aurella Yussuf) Black British Women/Femme Filmmakers Screening featuring Cecile Emeka's herenowthenwhat (2020) and Emily Mulenga's 4 survival 4 pleasure (2017).

theVOV 3d rendering of Phoebe Boswell, The Lighthouse 1, 2019 and Ythlaf, 2018. Courtesy of the artist, The Showroom and Prada.

Nephertiti Oboshie Schandorf is a British-Ghanain producer. Her practice is one that actively seeks collaboration and is informed by the formation of protective networks and cultural archives for those underrepresented or on the periphery of the contemporary UK arts ecology.

Nephertiti has worked on large scale and high profile projects with leading arts organisations including the Manchester and Whitworth Galleries, Art on the Underground, Somerset House, the Singapore Biennale and City of London. She holds a BA from the Manchester School of Art and an MA in Curating from the Royal College of Art. Nephertiti is part of the first cohort of residents for A House for Artists, a Grayson Perry backed initiative funded by the Mayor of London, the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) and led by Create London and has recently been appointed as the Artistic Director of Peckham Platform, a creative and educational charity founded in South London.

Born to Afro-Guyanese parents in South East London, Blaize began playing the violin at the age of seven. He went on to study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester with Steve Wilkie, where he specialised in chamber music and contemporary music performance.

Now based in East London, Blaize enjoys a varied career as an orchestral musician, chamber music player and teacher, having toured the UK and Europe with numerous ensembles. He is a regular player with Chineke!, Europe’s first orchestra of Black and ethnically diverse musicians, in addition to regular commitments as a session musician and recording artist, having recently worked with performers such as Annie Lennox, NAO, Sampha, Raleigh Ritchie and more. A committed performer of new music, Blaize enjoys regular collaborations with artists and composers to perform their works. As a featured soloist and ensemble player, he has performed extensively across London in the art world and contemporary music scene, as well as the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and New Music North West Festival in Manchester, UK. As an artist and composer, Blaize enjoys blending a broad range of musical genres and mediums to create complex, luscious soundscapes. His most recent performance art pieces make use of spoken word, improvisation, jazz harmony and digital manipulation to explore themes such as race, gender, sexuality and desire in an increasingly divided world.

Phoebe Boswell (Kenya/UK) is a multimedia artist who currently lives/works in London. Underpinned by a transient and diasporic consciousness, Phoebe Boswell’s practice speaks from the porous space between here and there.

She works intuitively across media, centering drawing but spanning animation, sound, video, writing, interactivity, performance and chorality. This tends to culminate in layered installations, which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Aesthetics of figuration and representation through the radical imaginary of Black feminisms become tools for contemplating the body as world, worldmaking, rather than merely as object to be gazed at. Artmaking becomes a political act of service to community, where labour-intensive drawing practices, immersive technologies, and calls for collective participation denote a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other; how we grieve, how we love, how we rest, how we heal, how we protest, how we remember the past in order to imagine the future.

Thick/er Black Lines is an interdisciplinary research-led artist collective. The group applies contemporary art theory, cultural studies and social practices to rewrite histories. Thick/er Black Lines was initiated by Rianna Jade Parker, Aurella Yussuf, Hudda Khaireh and Kariima Ali.

Thick/er Black Lines Website

Rianna Jade Parker is a critic, curator and researcher based in South London where she studied her MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Previously a Tate Collectives Producer, she is a Contributing Editor of frieze and a founding member of interdisciplinary art collective Thick/er Black Lines.

Aurella Yussuf is a writer and art historian based in the UK. After completing a BA in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton, she received her MA in Global Arts from Goldsmiths College. She is a founding member of interdisciplinary art collective Thick/er Black Lines and the convener of Kitchen Table Crit, a monthly forum for Black artists and writers.

Cecile Emeke is an artist and filmmaker from London. Her work explores time, epistemology and cultural production, through the prism of the black diasporic experience, often with particular emphasis on black british, caribbean and london culture, within liminal, interior and intimate spaces of a relational, physical, emotional and/or psychic nature.

Her work is preoccupied with subtly foregrounding modern and contemporary acts of ritual that emerge unconsciously within mundane and personal settings, thereby unfolding spheres of life that hide in plain sight. Her work has been exhibited and screened extensively, including presentations at the ica london, ica boston, the brooklyn museum, the museum of contemporary art chicago, and the national gallery of jamaica, amongst other institutions. She has spoken at oxford university, cambridge university, the institute of education, the university of edinburgh and the university of toronto, amongst other venues. She is currently developing several television, feature film, virtual reality and moving image projects, including her writer-directorial debut feature film, supported by bbc films.

Emily Mulenga is a mixed media artist. Using visuals and sound that draw upon video games, cartoons and the internet, her practice explores themes of post-capitalism, cyberfeminism, speculative digital utopias and the condition of being a millennial.

Mulenga’s output reflects a ravenous consumption of media, where gloss and superficiality meet anxiety and crisis, spanning past, present and future. Using 3D avatars to navigate luxurious digital landscapes, she has explored escapism, agency, race and womanhood. Through installation and digital imagery she has examined anxiety and apathy. Recently, she has interrogated the notion of the ‘end of the world’, looking at capitalist excess, haunting nostalgia and living in the anthropocene, navigating existential unease through humour. She is a graduate of MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts.

Julianknxx is an interdisciplinary poet, visual artist and filmmaker whose practice crosses the boundaries of the written word, music, visual art and installation. Through his practice, Julianknxx explores themes of inheritance, loss, and belonging, and their effects on personal and interpersonal narratives.

With his critical engagement with art history and philosophy, Julianknxx uses his personal history as a prism through which to deconstruct dominant perspectives on African art, ideas, history and culture. Rich with symbolism and complex layering his work conveys our continuing and necessary task of defining and redefining ourselves through the simultaneous rejection of extrinsic labels and repositioning of ourselves within new collective narratives.

Andrew Pierre Hart is a London-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores the symbiotic relationship between Painting and Sound.

His work is an ongoing rhythmic research and play of improvised and spontaneous generative processes, through various mediums including sound, video, performance, found object and image, language, and installation. Andrews's current work explores Cross-modality, Sonic ordering, re-interpretations of DJ technology, collaborative processes and Listening. Andrew has a Solo show currently at Tiwani Contemporary London’ The Listening Sweet’, Hart recently was in residence at Beaconsfield gallery Vauxhall London ArtAngel ‘Thinking Time ‘Awardee 2020, A 2019 Tiffany and Co Outset studio prize winner. He performed alongside friend and fellow artist Larry Amponsah at 'Collective Intimacy' at 180 The Strand in 2019.

Larry Amponsah (b. 1989, Accra-Ghana) is a multimedia artist whose practice investigates traditional modes of image-making whilst employing unconventional strategies of production to look at the contemporary politics of imagery.

Amponsah transforms, cuts into archives of both digital and printed images, which he assembles in collages that are further worked upon using mechanical processes (printing) and his honed skills as a conventionally trained painter. In this succession of strategic moves about image-making techniques, dynamic compositions emerge, as well as compelling, dreamy narratives or portraits that reference the artist's own West African upbringing within a greater Black global narrative. Amponsah attempts to demystify the tendency of stereotyping the myriad of histories and people of African origin. Collage appears as a leitmotif in his work and was inspired to him by the popular paper calendars that are stuck onto each other on the walls of simple shops and homes in Ghana. Collage emphasizes the notions of hybridity, movement, and fluidity which for the artist are the keys of the black resilience and excellence.

Larry Amponsah received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2018) after studying at Jiangsu University China (2016) and at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi in Ghana (2015). Recent exhibitions were at Billboard, Bloc Projects, Sheffield, The Vinyl Factory & The Showroom, the London Courtauld Institute of Art and the Delfina Foundation, London.