Saved events

God Bless the Child (15*) + Conversation with Christoper Harris and Kodwo Eshun

Experiments in Film

A drawing of a Black child with scratched out eyes

A multi-media event that delves into Christopher Harris' first autobiographical project; comparing the US care system to life in Senegal, blending personal history, archive, and 16mm footage.

Drawing on his experience in foster care, Harris weaves together photographs and official records with film material from Senegal. He examines the structures of social welfare and child services along with Black childhood in the US.

Within the wider historical context of the transatlantic slave trade, especially the role that the French Catholic Church played in colonialism, Harris' hometown of St. Louis, Missouri and Saint-Louis, Senegal appear as parallel spaces shaped by shared histories. 

Harris will be joined by Kodwo Eshun to explore the themes of his work and discuss the archival materials that are the foundation of his upcoming experimental essay film: records from the Archdiocese of St. Louis, family photographs, his childhood adoption listing.

An open conversation and audience Q&A offer a chance to engage directly with Harris. 

This event has been developed in collaboration with Valentine Umansky and the Tate Modern.

Special thanks to Christopher Harris and Kodwo Eshun.

The screening is co-presented with Tate Film. A second programme, featuring Chris Harris's earliest and most recent films, will be held on 28 May in the Starr Cinema at Tate Modern.

Biographies

Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video, among other strategies. Like his production techniques, his influences—among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. Working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films, like the music from which they take inspiration, embody the existential complexities and paradoxes of racialized identity in the U.S. His films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques, including solo screenings at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Locarno Film Festival, and Arsenal Berlin, among many others. Harris is Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.

Kodwo Eshun is a filmmaker, theorist and artist, based in London. His research interests include art, critical theory, post-war liberation movements, modern and contemporary musicality, cybernetic theory, the cinematic soundtrack and archaeologies of futurity. He teaches at the Centre for Research Architecture at the Department of Visual Cultures, University of London and he is co Director of The Otolith Collective.

In 2002, he founded The Otolith Group together with Anjalika Sagar. They are interdisciplinary artists working internationally for over two decades with a pluralistic body of forms including, installation, publication, performance, photography and video. Their practice observes methods of research that manifest as distinct cosmogonies that see and hear across media.

The Otolith Group has grown as a collaborative platform that seeks to rethink the dynamics of cultural production under conditions of accelerated, unstable and precarious global conditions. Films, art works, exhibitions, curated programmes, and publications are collectively conceived, and research forms the basis of the practice. The Otolith Group were nominated for The Turner Prize in 2010 and have exhibited internationally since 2002.
 

Cinema 2

Location
Barbican Cinema 2 & 3 are located on Beech Street, a short walk from the Barbican’s Silk Street entrance. From Silk Street, you’ll see a zebra crossing that will take you across the road to the venue. 

Address
Beech Street
London
EC2Y 8DS

Public transport
The Barbican is widely accessible by bus, tube, train and by foot or bicycle. Plan your journey and find more route information in ‘Your Visit’ or book your car parking space in advance.