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Grace Ndiritu

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Grace Ndiritu

Black Beauty, 2021
one channel video, colour & black and white, aspect ratio 4:3
29 minutes
Edition of 3
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Black Beauty (2021) was screened at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival in 2022. Hinging on the figure of a Black fashion model, the video brings the intellectual legacy of...
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Black Beauty (2021) was screened at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival in 2022. Hinging on the figure of a Black fashion model, the video brings the intellectual legacy of Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) into conversation with questions related to fashion, the environment, migration, and Indigenous communities.

Source: Healing the Museum published by Motto p.67

Won 2 major film awards in the film industry in 2022:
- Jarman Film award
- 72nd Berlinale
- institutions may be interested in the 2 screen work, collectors in the 1 screen
- Grace's first film - she wrote the script, brought together the crew and actors - before when making film she was doing everything herself, this was a big jump for Grace and her practise

Key themes: climate change, African migration and shamanism

Debate: Taken from well known late night TV shows of the 1980s e.g. Foucault vs Chomsky - always 2 white men. Black Beauty is an inversion of this - Jorge Luis Borges = untouchable Titan of the 21st century talking with Karen Roberts, TV host - so rare to have a young African woman holding court. Difference in age and race but they have a good rapport

- subtle conflation of opposites through the film: beautiful but disturbing subject matter

Style: borrows style of late 70s/early 80s - colours/clothing - looks archival in the way it's edited
- soundtrack with Alice Coltrane and bohemian appearance
- Filmed on Betacam (original equipment from the early 80s) and 2k film (on an Alexa camera)

Film structure:
- non-linear time, uncanny, surreal, hypnotic
- inner joke - subversion of a fiction/narrative
- the film rewards watching several times otherwise easy to miss things
- deeper messages laced through the film

Details:
- model - Black Beauty - talks about 5000 SPF - something has gone very wrong with the planet to need this
- Borges talking about his 'new book' Painted River - Grace invented this book - people who watch assume it's a real text. Part of the mythology around the film as Grace describes it, creating 'it's own genre'
- at the end 'next week Steve Jobs will be discussing his new invention the Apple'
- Rio Summit - Borges was dead by then, impossible to be there
- Grace gave him the Novel Prize for literature in the film

- part about collections and museums - why do people collect? (Relates to Grace's practise more broadly)
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Publications

Grace Ndiritu: Healing the Museum, published by Motto Books, 2023
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