A Film Screening and Video Installation Exploring the Spectral Legacies of African National Cinemas
Join us at G.A.S. Lagos from 19–21 June 2025 for AfterImages, a three-day programme of video installations and screenings developed as part of the Art Exchange: Moving Image programme. Curated by Ese Emmanuel, the programme explores the spectral legacies of African national cinemas and builds on Art for the People: African National Cinemas, an ongoing research project that examines the ‘nation’ as both an ideological and material framework through which African films were created, promoted, and circulated in the post-independence era.
Focusing on the cinemas of Sudan, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Cameroon, the project reflects on cinema’s role in shaping postcolonial consciousness. AfterImages emerges from this inquiry, turning its attention to Cameroonian cinema, alongside other Global South perspectives to explore notions of the spectral and the residual. The series considers how moving images linger in memory and archives, and how artists engage with these cinematic histories to produce new resonances. Through a curated selection of archival films and contemporary artistic interventions, the programme invites viewers to reflect on how African and diasporic filmmakers navigate the afterlives of national imaginaries and the enduring legacies of colonialism in cinematic form.
Event Details
This event spans three days that require individual RSVPs. If you would like to attend all, kindly register for each slot seperetely.
Date: 19th - 21st June, 2025
Day One: 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Day Two: 1:00pm - 5:00pm
Day Three: 4:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: 9b, Hakeem Dickson Drive, off T.F. Kuboye Road, Oniru, Lagos
Day One
1:00pm - Installation Walkthrough
5:00pm - Session ends
RSVP HERE
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Day Two
1:00pm - Installation Walkthrough
5:00pm - Session ends
RSVP HERE
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Day Three
4:00pm - Film Screenings
7:00pm - In conversation with Dr. Tinashe and Dara Omotosho
8:00pm - Session ends
RSVP HERE
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Film still. THE STATES OF THINGS, (Rosalind Nashashibi, 2000). Image courtesy of LUX.
Programme Details
From the Archives I: Two by Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa
This section revisits the work of Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, one of Cameroon’s most influential filmmakers, whose films vividly depict the cultural and political shifts of post-independence Africa. Through this screening, audiences are invited to witness how his films navigate the tensions between tradition and modernity and questions of national/racial identity. Produced in the 1970s and 1980s—Muna Moto marking its 50th anniversary—these works remain vital touchpoints in African cinema.
Films:
Muna Moto (1975) – A landmark film addressing gender, tradition, and modernity in Cameroonian society.
Histoire Drôle et Drôle des Gens (1983) – A humorous take on postcolonial Cameroonian society.
From the Archives II: Rosalind Nashashibi & Erika Tan
This section brings together the work of Rosalind Nashashibi and Erika Tan, two artists who engage with archival material—or its carefully constructed semblance—to interrogate colonial visuality, the representation of the "other," and the fluid nature of historical narratives. Nashashibi and Tan problematize the authority of archival images and question how histories are constructed, remembered, and reimagined. Both films are now housed in the British Council’s Moving Image Collection.
Films:
The States of Things (2000, Rosalind Nashashibi) – Grainy, black and white 16mm footage depicts aged women and a few men, rifling through piles of clothes: bustling, folding, arranging. A mournful, Egyptian love song is playing: Hali Fi Hawaha Agab recorded by Um Kolsoum in the 1920s. The viewer is left to grope around and try to locate what they are watching. The time and the place of the film become slippery.
Persistent Visions (2005, Erika Tan) – Navigating the Moving Image archives of the Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Tan questions the status of the archive as “historical evidence” encounters a persistence of visions, images that kept reoccurring over time and space, and remained after she departed from the archives.
Ghost Cinemas: Thérèse Sita-Bella, Goddy Leye, Sarah Maldoror
In the final section, Ghost Cinemas considers the traces left behind by certain filmmakers—figures whose contributions persist in archival records and personal memory yet remain elusive within the material culture of film, where works are continuously shared, reproduced, or restored. This section reflects on the gaps and absences that shape cinema history.
Goddy Leye (1965–2011) was a Cameroonian multimedia artist and filmmaker whose work explored the postcolonial condition. A pioneering figure in contemporary African art, Leye was deeply invested in the intersection of film and conceptual art, often interrogating the mechanisms of representation and erasure. Despite his influence, much of Leye’s oeuvre remains difficult to access.
Thérèse Sita-Bella (1933–2006) was a Cameroonian filmmaker and journalist, often credited as one of Africa’s first female directors. Her 1963 documentary Tam Tam à Paris—which followed a Cameroonian dance troupe in France—was among the earliest films made by an African woman, yet it has largely disappeared from public view, with only fragmented references—one-line sentences and footnotes—to its existence.
Sarah Maldoror (1929 - 2020) was a French filmmaker and director whose oeuvre of rebellious work is made up of fiction, documentary, and poetry. She was considered a leading figure in African cinema and the first female director on the continent.
Revisiting these artists, “Ghost Cinemas” raises critical questions about access and visibility.
Films:
Tam Tam à Paris (Thérèse Sita-Bella, 1963) – a short documentary featured at the Festival Panafricain du cinéma de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) in 1969. It dealt with the performance of the National Dance Company of Cameroon at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris and examined the complex relationship between drumming and dance.
We Are the World (Goddy Leye, 2006) & Other Shorts – interrogations of the politics of global representation, media spectacle, postcoloniality, and collective memory.
Foreword to Guns for Banta (Kleyebe Abonnenc, 2011) - Originally an analog slide show made for two projectors, this work recounts the making of Sarah Maldoror’s lost and surely never-to-be-seen first film Guns for Banta.
About the Curator
Ese Emmanuel is a writer, cultural worker and curator, among other things. Alongside other curators at Monangambee – a nomadic Lagos-based microcinema – they organise screenings that engage Black continental and diasporic filmmakers, Third Cinema, and cinematic movements stemming from the Global South. Her work prioritises the radical imaginary, making space for collaboration, play, care, and rest. She currently lives and works between Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria.
ABOUT ART EXCHANGE: MOVING IMAGE
The Art Exchange: Moving Image programme is a collaborative and cross-cultural curatorial professional development and exhibition programme for early to mid-career visual arts curators from Sub-Saharan Africa working with moving image. The programme is supported by the British Council and organised by LUX, the UK agency for the support and promotion of artists working with moving image, Yinka Shonibare Foundation and Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, Nigeria.
Header Image: Film still, MUNA MOTO (Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, 1975). Image. courtesy of Doc Films Chicago.
The programme is supported by the British Council and organised by LUX, Yinka Shonibare Foundation and Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation.
