Presentation and chat between the director and the curator of the season, Beatriz Leal.
Akosua Adoma Owusu (1984) is a Ghanaian-American director whose work explores creative and critical tension between her roots and her experience in the American diaspora. Topics such as culture, gender, identity or postcolonial African history are present in her work, proposing a reflection on what the author calls the ‘warring consciousness’ of the African immigrant in the United States. Presentation and chat between the director and the curator of the season, Beatriz Leal.
AKOSUA ADOMA OWUSU
The audio-visual production by Akosua Adoma Owusu (USA, 1984) is composed of experimental shorts and documentary films that give us a refined visual and narrative plot and soundtrack where Akan myths and fables, kente fabrics, hairstyles, music and references to the Afro-American community mingle with details from the author’s autobiography. The creative and critical tension between her Ghanaian roots and her experience in the American diaspora challenge our expectations about culture, gender, identity and postcolonial African history. They force us to reflect on what the author calls the "warring consciousness" of African immigrants in the US, forced to negotiate a reality that is threefold: assimilation with white culture if they want to succeed; instant association with the Afro-American community as a result of skin colour and, in many cases, lack of identification of Africans with the culture and Afro-American history due to the marked differences with their African counterparts.
Her productions have won awards at numerous international festivals and now form part of archives and collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fowler Museum, the Yale University Film Study Center and the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University in Bloomington. Considered by Artforum as one of the Top Ten Artists and by the Huffington Post as one of the 30 artists under 40 years to follow, Owusu has screened her work at institutions around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MoMA and the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Berlinale and the London Film Festival. In 2013 she received a MacDowell Colony fellowship and in 2015 the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
On the occasion of the screening of a detailed selection of her films to date, the director will also be present to reflect on the evolution, material difficulties and formal and aesthetic aspects and motivations of her work. She will take us through her first experimental videos to her recent arrival in the world of cinema and her success at international festivals such as the Berlinale, where Reluctantly Queer (2015) has been honoured as the only short film selected for the competition from the entire African continent. Making use of experimental video, documentary or fiction, Akosua Adoma Owusu forces viewers to stop and reflect on the construction of the discourses of race, colonialism, sexism and domination and to confront stereotypes and anxieties to deepen and broaden the dialogue Africa holds with the rest of the world. Immersed in the process of making her first feature film (Black sunshine), the director will tell us about this new stage of her artistic life and creation.
Beatriz Leal