This screening program is part of the coming to terms exhibition by Karina Griffith, Giovanna Esposito Yussif and Jaana Kokko, on view at Sinne 27.8.–2.10.2022
Read more on the exhibition and see the full program here
We Call It Love: An Oppositional Screening
• Time: Thursday 1.9. at 19–20.30
• Address: Sinne, Iso Roobertinkatu 16, Helsinki
• Length: 70 min
• All program is held in English.
Please bring your own records featuring music from Black female artists to play during the screening.
Karina Griffith’s ongoing research expands the genealogies of Black-Authored Cinema in Germany. At the same time, she examines the decolonial role of the moving image. We Call It Love is an intervention into the film They Call It Love (1972) by King Ampaw that returns the gaze of both the filmmaker and the archive that refused to release the film for decades.
When access to the archive is refused, the task of decolonizing history is made all the more difficult. Reflecting on this knowledge and experience, We Call It Love combines fragments of Griffith’s research and shows ways of making the archive visible and accessible again. She asks: How can we recover fifty years of lost spectators?
Karina Griffith is an artist and researcher who uses moving image, performance and installations to question archives and conditions of spectatorship. Through the concepts “affective debt” and “reparatory imaginings” she creates objects, films and experiences that are spaces for speculation.
Her films and installations have been shown at international galleries and festivals, and she has curated film and interdisciplinary programmes for the Goethe Institute, Berlinale Forum, alpha nova & galerie futura and VTape among others. Griffith led the BAAB (Black Arts Action Berlin) curatorial team for the first Black Reels Festival at ACUD Macht Neu in 2021 and that same year joined the curatorial team of the Berlinale Forum Expanded. In 2017 she curated the three-month long festival, Republik Repair: Ten Points, Ten Demands, One Festival Reparatory Imaginings from Black Berlin at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. She lectures at the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of Art and is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute, where her research on Black authorship in German cinema interacts with theories of affect and intersectionality. Her writing can be found in the Darkmatter Journal, Texte zur Kunst, Berlin Art Link, Shadow & Act, the Rosa Mercedes journal of the Harun Farocki Institut and the Berlinale Forum Magazine, among others.
With special thanks to District Berlin and the Decolonizing 68 Studio Residency.
The working group would also like to thank Classic Audio, Eronen Records and Digelius Records.