Celebrated artist-filmmaker Christopher Harris will be in London this May for a series of screenings at Tate Modern and the Barbican Centre. The programme, spanning both venues, includes the UK premiere of his latest film, Speaking in Tongues Take One—an experimental interpretation of Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo—as well as a work-in-progress screening of God Bless the Child, an autobiographical exploration of the artist’s experiences as a foster child.
Harris creates films and video installations that examine African American historiography through the lens of experimental cinema. Often incorporating archival material, his work features re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen-captured video, among other strategies. His influences are eclectic, drawing from Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and, most significantly, all forms of Black music.
Navigating the spaces between sound and image, past and present, absence and presence, Harris’s films—like the music that inspires them—embody the existential complexities of racialized identity in the U.S.
These sessions offer London audiences a rare opportunity to experience these seldom-screened films and engage with the practice of one of today’s most compelling artists working in film.