Tiona Nekkia McClodden
Directing
Biography
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is an American visual artist, filmmaker and curator based in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the founder and director of Conceptual Fade, a micro-gallery and library space centering Black artistic productions.
Known For
Queer culture and the arts would be much poorer without the presence and contribution of butch and stud lesbians, whose identity is both its own aesthetic and a defiant repudiation of the male gaze.
The Renegades
This documentary is about the perspectives and lives of black lesbians from assorted backgrounds.
Black./Womyn.:Conversations with Lesbians of African Descent
Between 2014 and 2017, McClodden revived the work of deceased Black queer artists who were active during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, including the poet and activist Essex Hemphill. Here, McClodden remakes a scene from Marlon Riggs’s essay-film Tongues Untied (1989), in which Hemphill recites a passage from writer Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984). McClodden describes the video as “a portrait of self-contained conflict and rage,” with Hemphill gazing directly into the camera. Conceived as a “duet” between Hemphill and Lorde, it also underscores Hemphill’s commitment to Black feminist thought, highlighting the transfer of language and influence from one poet-activist to another. [Overview Courtesy of MoMA]
Af-Fixing Ceremony: Four Movements for Essex, Movement I: Essex + Audre
A short film about a brief and intimate meeting between a young black lesbian woman who is in the process of taking an HIV test and a middle aged black gay HIV positive man.
Bumming Cigarettes
The Labyrinth 1.0 is a poetic film essay that cites writer and poet Brad Johnson’s poem “The Labyrinth,” published in the anthology Milking Black Bull (1995). Sourcing 16-mm surveillance footage, 16-mm 1970s tearoom porn, and structuralist film footage shot in North Philadelphia, the work visually explores the concept of the labyrinth space as a site for cruising and gesture-based desire. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2017 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS, a program of seven videos prioritizing Black narratives within the ongoing AIDS epidemic curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett.
The Labyrinth 1.0
McClodden hangs upside down in her studio while reciting “On Subjugation,” a 1988 poem by Johnson. “For me, the experience of pain through BDSM has often been a form of self-care that lets me know where I can and cannot go with my body,” McClodden says. “This is important to me in a society that . . . places such severe restrictions on the Black body.” Using her figure as a medium, she pays tribute to Johnson’s ideas in the present. [Overview Courtesy of MoMA]