Ufuoma Essi
Directing
Biography
Ufuoma Essi Is a video artist and filmmaker from Lewisham, South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image as well as photography and sound. Her work revolves around Black feminist epistemology and the configuration of displaced histories.The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of political and historical narratives. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-centre the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of black women. Drawing from a range of influences including black popular culture, films, music, historical texts and black feminist theory from writers such as Claudia Jones to Daphne Brooks. Essi’s work also seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and explores intersectional themes of race, gender, class and sexuality. Ufuoma’s films have been screened and exhibited at film festivals, institutions and galleries in the UK and abroad such as the Barbican, South London Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, Black Star Film Festival Festival, Maysles Documentary Center, CinemAfrica Film Festival and Chisenhale Studios. Ufuoma has worked as a freelance film programmer and programmed screenings with the Barbican and Bernie Grant Arts Centre. She is also member of the South London Gallery based Black women and POC non-binary collective Narration Group where she has co-curated exhibitions and public programmes.
Known For
Is My Living in Vain is a meditation on the continuing history and emancipatory potential of the Black church as a space of belonging, affirmation and community organising. Combining shot footage, oral histories and archive material from both sides of the Atlantic, the film follows a tangled thread of personal and collective memories to interrogate the church’s contribution to a Black radical tradition.
Is My Living In Vain
Pastoral Malaise is a short film about the absences within rural pastoral environments, often framed by romanticism and picturesque conventions, constructed as tourist sites and refuges in rural landscapes across Britain.
Pastoral Malaise
Travelling across space and time, varied cityscapes act like scaffolding, holding up reflections on memory – what was silenced – and generational perseverance
Half Memory
"All That You Can't Leave Behind" is an experimental appropriated video archive film that explores the relationship between Black women's collective experience with music, history and the act of reclamation.
All That You Can't Leave Behind
Bodies In Dissent by Ufuoma Essi is an exploration of the body as a central site of remembrance and resistance. Exploring ideas around 'bodily insurgency' and using the body as an archive, as a point of return, a position of refusal, a broker between transgenerational life and histories, past, present and future. Through archives and evocations Ufuoma Essi examines the legacies and specific histories that connect us and shape our understanding of the past.
Bodies in Dissent
The film examines a group of second-generation Black British women and their relationship with identity, feelings of cultural displacement, and their shared histories. Informed by contributions of the 1980s Black feminist movement in England and the legacies of first-generation children of African and Caribbean immigrants, the film incorporates archive, VHS and 16mm footage.