Kirsty Flockhart

Actress with a long aqua dress, surrounded by four people assisting in an outdoor film shoot, based in a Spanish stone quarry

Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River* was an exhibition, running from Wednesday 11th May - Saturday 16th July 2022, a public programme, which took place on Friday 13th and Saturday 14th May, and an accompanying publication, at LUX, London.

The exhibition and programme called upon artists to expand the public’s horizons of temporal divides of past, present and future. The global pandemic has caused many to question the dominance of linear time. Through moving image, live performance, workshops and text, the artists in this project investigated different subjectivities of time.

The film-based exhibition was dedicated to the British Kenyan artist and activist, Grace Ndiritu (b.1982), whose practice is deeply concerned with our contemporary world seeing it through the twin lenses of healing and spirituality, by finding alternative ways for humanity to live. Her archive of over forty 'hand-crafted' videos; Post-Hippie Pop-Abstraction collages and shamanic performances reflect her alternative ways of looking and seeing the world through spiritual practice.

Inviting audiences to immerse themselves in Ndiritu’s two films: “A Week in the News: 7 places we think we know, 7 news stories we think we understand” (2010) and “Black Beauty” (2021), the exhibition reflected the artist’s explorations of “deep time”. The two works stood in dialogue with each other in two separate screening rooms to enable the viewers to see a continuity and development between the artist’s ideas across eleven years. Ndiritu’s intermediary film “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (2015) was screened online for the first week of the exhibition. Her films blur the lines between different time frames and explore themes of media, authorship and historical narratives, whilst expanding on notions of temporality.

Grace Ndiritu’s debut short film “Black Beauty” has been selected for prestigious film festivals including 72nd Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section (2022), 32nd FIDMarseille (2022), and British Art Show 9 (2022) . Most recently her work has been featured at Flat Time House (2022), British Art Show 9 (2021/2022), Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Kunsthal Gent (2021).

*Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River’s title derived from Borges’ theories on the fluidity of time. Borges features as a fictional protagonist in Ndiritu’s “Black Beauty”, and his notion of “An Absolute River” was inspired by Heraclitus’ “No Man ever Steps in the Same River Twice”.

In the accompanying public programme, artists Rieko Whitfield, Serena Huang and Dr Jason Allen-Paisant guided audiences through an atemporal journey. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’, the Argentinian writer, ideas around the mysterious nature of time, the exhibition and programme explored alternative ideas of time to widely accepted linear narratives.

The three contributors in the live programme each deal with critical conceptions of time in their practice. Visitors to the workshop led by Rieko Whitfield reflected on past histories through non-linear writing activities and guided meditation. Serena Huang invited her participants to reimagine potential futures using found objects to create a temporary work of theatrical art. Performing a soundscape with spoken word, Dr Jason Allen-Paisant explored the ways in which sound evades temporal categorisation and affects us differently to visual representations. The audience was invited to contemplate an unfinished past and imagine futures beyond linear time. The accompanying publication “Grace Ndiritu: An Absolute River” offered different perspectives of temporality, and gave audiences opportunities to interact with these themes and the screenings in a tangible and enduring way.

Our publication 'Grace Ndiritu: An Absolute River' expands our work on non-linear time: through a commissioned text ‘Pantemporal Intimacies: For Life Outside of Racialised Time’ by Dr Jason Allen-Paisant, and transcribed conversations with our contributing artists Grace Ndiritu, Rieko Whitfield and Serena Huang. Each artist is asked about their personal experiences and professional practices investigating different subjectivities of time.

Portrait of Kirsty Flockhart, blonde hair tied in a loose bun, wearing glasses with earrings and blouse, face leaning on fist.

Kirsty Flockhart is an artist, curator and researcher. She is interested in using art to explore the political, and in reviewing how art practices reflect political moments and cultural movements. Kirsty’s curatorial practices are informed by ideas that interrogate hegemonic structures and subvert cultural and social paradigms. Her recent dissertation examined the ways in which the structures of Biennials reinforce or critique global and colonial hegemonic structures, asking in what ways can artists or curators effect changes? Kirsty is keen to explore systemic bias and discrimination in the arts, to both reflect and try to work through these issues in public-facing exhibitions and systemically within arts institutions.

Kirsty is specifically interested in anti-colonial strategies, the diaspora, what it means to navigate between identity and art practice, to exist between nation states and cultures, and the academic work of Stuart Hall. For example, her research into biennials focused on critiquing the use of soft power and the rise of neocolonialism. Kirsty pursued this by exploring key ‘counter’ exhibitions over recent years at the Venice Biennale. Her previous dissertation during her MA in Art and Politics, Goldsmiths, analysed the intersectional use of hip-hop as a feminist tool for women across Latin America, with a focus on Mexico and Cuba in particular. Kirsty also directs 'Eros Noches', nights of poetry, art and music events based in Mexico City.

As a curator and researcher, Kirsty has a keen interest in supporting programming and research to advance the inclusion of the diaspora, stateless people and those historically excluded to collections, commissions and systemically within arts institutions. She strives to work for institutions dedicated to discourse on politics of race, class and gender. Kirsty seeks a career that combines her interest in politics through both art and activism.

'Black Beauty' (2021) Installation Shot – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

'Black Beauty' (2021) Installation Shot

'Black Beauty' (2021) Installation Shot – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

Directorial debut by visual artist Grace Ndiritu. African fashion model Alexandra Cartier meets Jorge Luis Borges in a visionary hallucination. What does the famous Argentine modernist writer have to say about our contemporary ecological and pandemic problems?

Grace Ndiritu's debut short film 'Black Beauty' has been selected for prestigious film festivals including 72nd Berlinale in the Forum Expanded section (2022) and 32nd FIDMarseille (2022). Most recently her work has been featured in Flat Time House (2022), British Art Show 9 (2021/2022), Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Kunsthal Gent (2021).

Film Still 'A Week in the News: 7 places we think we know, 7 news stories we think we understand. (2010)' by Grace Ndiritu

Installation image 'A Week in the News' (2010)' by Grace Ndiritu – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

'A Week in the News' by Grace Ndiritu examines how the global media has manipulated particular news stories to create specific stereotypes about certain places. It contrasts two styles of presenting news that have at their root two opposing value systems e.g. scrolling subtitles text reminiscent of mainstream news outlets like CNN, with a guerrilla news filmmaking style adopted by grassroots media organizations like Indymedia who provide up to the minute alternative news to the mainstream. Each video location presents true and false images and facts about that specific country.

colour video, silent

35 min

Grace Ndiritu in conversation with Benjamin Cook – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

Opening Night: Grace Ndiritu in conversation with Benjamin Cook – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

Grace Ndiritu in conversation with Benjamin Cook – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

Conversation between artist Grace Ndiritu and Benjamin Cook, Director of LUX, where they discussed Ndiritu's artistic relationship with non-linear time on the opening night of the exhibition.

Performance 'Pantemporal Intimacies: For Life Outside of Racialised Time'’ by Dr Jason Allen-Paisant – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

Live Performance of spoken-word poetry and soundscape by Dr Jason Allen-Paisant – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

Dr Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer who lives in Leeds, he is a contributing author to our publication ‘Grace Ndiritu - An Absolute River' and performed spoken word poetry with an accompanying sound-scape made from recording of Waterlow Park. His performance at LUX was the closing finale of the programme on Saturday the 14th May at 5pm.

Workshop by Artist Serena Huang – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

Serena Huang’s workshop explores the theatrical moment between humans, objects, and everyday life. Revisiting our relationship with our environment, and objects, participants were encouraged to find different ways of interacting with the found objects, space, light and time. We looked at the relationship between seemingly irrelevant things, and stage the coincidental moments which activated the theatricality in our everyday life. Through a series of presentations and micro-tasks across Waterlow Park, participants produced a 2-5min performance in small groups.

Serena Huang is a 2020 RCA Contemporary Art Practice graduate. Her interest lies in moving image, sound and performance, and she embeds herself in increasingly ambiguous timelines through continually archiving and re-contextualising her own works. She was recently awarded Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 Prize.

Writing workshop by Rieko Whitfield – Photo credit to Dimitri D’ippolito

“Mythologies of Memory” is a writing workshop and guided meditation led by multidisciplinary artist Rieko Whitfield. Whitfield invites workshop participants to unravel the illusion of the self, decolonising lived experience from the hegemony of linear time. Participants will employ propositional storytelling to navigate the mythologies of personal identity within shared political landscapes. Memories, affect, and the ritual of writing open portals to reimagining collective narratives. “Mythologies of Memory” was created in response to the fictional interview with writer Jorge Luis Borges in Grace Ndiritu’s moving image work Black Beauty (2020).

Rieko Whitfield (b. 1992, Japan) weaves immersive worlds with speculative mythologies in her tentacular practice spanning performance, moving image, installation, sculpture, music, and text. Her storytelling decentres narratives of Western, capitalist individualism toward beyond-human collectivism. She is an MA graduate of the Royal College of Art and founding director of the performance art platform Diasporas Now.

Kirsty Flockhart

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Royal College of Art