Elmina: An Unusual Black and White Movie

CADRE Lecture Series
Free Public Lecture by Douglas Fishbone (Video and Performance Artist)

Tuesday 14th February 2012, 6.00pm, MK045

Elmina: An Unusual Black and White Movie Douglas Fishbone discusses his latest work Elmina, shot entirely on location in Ghana.

Douglas Fishbone often uses satire and humour within his film, performance and installation works to examine consumer culture and the mass media in a critical and disarming way. His work weaves elaborate narrative and visual tapestries from freely found imagery, often sourced directly from the internet, that question the way information is presented, manipulated and processed in the contemporary visual landscape.

Elmina, Fishbone’s new feature-length melodrama, pushes this exploration in a different direction, presenting an unusual experiment in collaboration that connects two vastly different audiences – the Western art world, and the African home video market. Filmed in Ghana with a cast of major Ghanaian celebrities, Fishbone’s only artistic intervention is the insertion of himself, a white American artist, as the lead role in an otherwise completely African production. The work fully adopts Ghanaian film making conventions, and was written and directed by one of Ghana’s leading production companies. Elmina continues Fishbone’s examination of relativity, perception and the politics of representation and audience engagement, while raising broader questions about race, globalization and the possibility of a shared visual language.

Elmina will be distributed on VCD in Africa and immigrant communities in Europe later in the year, challenging the way both art films and African films are usually produced and distributed.

Elmina had its world premiere at Tate Britain in 2010 and was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria in 2011. It was recently on view at a solo exhibition at CIRCA Projects in Sunderland, at Dublin Contemporary in Ireland, and as part of the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 at the ZKM in Karslruhe, Germany.