CHARLOTTENBORG ART CINEMA presents ‘Aftershocks’ curated by Mai Takawira

This film programme presents a number of selected documentaries, records and video works which call attention to aftershocks that are local in nature and/or connected to ‘a Danish reality.’ The series launches interventions into the museum space, the written word, the archives, the asylum system and the EU border control policy. An accumulation of disobedience manifests itself as past and contemporary practices are questioned and challenged, pointing towards their impact on Black lives. At the same time, something is stirring, a counter-pressure, an insistence on existing; that Black Lives Matter.

Christina Sharpe describes In The Wake: On Blackness and Being how Black being is still unfolding within and up against the aftermath of slavery. The transatlantic slave trade has left the Black body in a state of turmoil, a continuing shock and tremor, oscillating between emergence and disintegration. Life and death. It is like the “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water”, she writes. The struggle to breathe, the struggle against disappearing in the wake continues.

Christina Sharpe hails from an African-American background, but the murder of George Floyd has sent shockwaves through the global landscape because anti-blackness exists globally. Because the colonialist and enslaving patterns embedded in the past continue to make themselves felt, making the value of Black people unclear in the Western dominant optics. Because the wake extends from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

Text by Mai Takawira

Photo: still from Cast Away Soul by Stanley Edward, Nanna Katrine Hansen, Thomas Elsted, Markus Fiedler.

Emil Elg: Hvis du er hvid er du min fjende / Når jer ser et rødt flag smælde. 2016. 21.16 min. Stanley Edward, Nanna Katrine Hansen, Thomas Elsted, Markus Fiedler: Cast Away Souls, 2019 (34.00 min.) Grada Kilomba: WHILE I WRITE: Act III of The Desire Project, 2016. (2,34 min.) Jeannette Ehlers: Black is a Beautiful Word. I & I (encountering the Danish colonial archive), 2019. (4.47 min.)

For further film descriptions see Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s app.