To celebrate the opening of École du soir, an exhibition by Christian Nyampeta, the African Film Institute presents the Shanghai premiere of A Song About Love. An additional screening is scheduled on 11 May.
A Song About Love screening program takes music videos as a serious category of cinematic force and offers a festive evening/afternoon of visual poems sourced collectively from the members of the community of collaborators, supporters, and partners of the African Film Institute. The offering will range from pioneering works in the genre as it relates to the African lifeworlds, traversing through its contemporary forms, and journeying into sonic cultures described from within and beyond Afrofuturism. The irreverently transgeographic cultural assemblage that characterizes some of the selected music videos helps to outplay the perennial isolation onto which African cinema is rightly or wrongly said to be subjected.
Music videos offer playful and experimental laboratories for filmmakers, cinematographers, and producers to explore aspects of their work otherwise impossible within the formal cinematic medium alone. Such works of culture are obviously works of the popular imaginaries that chart artistic aspirations, while giving rhythm to the societal changes, and recording the global order of technological shifts. As such, music videos help to map aesthetic alliances as well as cultural power centers and their influences onto their peripheries.
With videos featuring Francis Bebey, Mbilia Bel, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, CKay, Davido, Zinja Hlungwani, Angelique Kidjo, Libianca, Miriam Makeba, Tshala Muana, Nakhane, Monique Seka, Papa Wemba, and more. Introduced by Christian Nyampeta.
Free and open to the public.
No registration is required for the opening on 7 March. Registration is required for the screening on 11 May. To register, please click the “Register” button on the left of this page or scan the QR code below. Please register by 17:00 on 9 May.
In conjunction with École du soir, an exhibition by Christian Nyampeta.
The exhibition École du soir and related events are presented as the fourth season of the ICA’s second artistic research program, Another Knowledge Is Possible (2021-24), exploring neglected and repressed ways of knowing and the complex politics of knowledge decolonization.
