Between birth and death, is the power to love and live. Political rules, religious orders, social norms and cultural taboos control who we love and how we love. But the erotic has the power to emancipate. With spoken word and archive sources, love is unboxed from categories in queer expression and a celebration of eros as the power to change our attitudes to life and to allow others to live their lives without judgment or prejudice.

Inspired by Senegalese writer and film director Ousmane Sembène’s idea of cinema as a communal learning environment, Nyampeta placed his 2018 film, Sometimes It Was Beautiful, at the center of his project. The film, which was projected on a large screen suspended in the darkened rotunda, features a group of unlikely friends who gather to watch and critique films made by Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist in the Congo between 1948 and 1952. Their discussion highlights enduring tensions surrounding social transformation, cultural property, and who has the right to representation.

Onyeka Igwe is a London born & based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task.

Onyeka’s video works have been screened at Modern Mondays, MoMA, Artists’ Film Club: Black Radical Imagination, ICA, London, 2017; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2020, and at film festivals internationally including the London Film Festival, 2015 and 2020; Open City Documentary Film Festival 2021 and 2022, Rotterdam International, Netherlands, 2018, 2019 and 2020; Edinburgh Artist Moving Image, 2016; Images Festival, Canada, 2019, and the Smithsonian African American film festival, USA, 2018.

Solo exhibitions include history is a living weapon in yr hand, Bonington Gallery and Peer, UK, 2024, A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver), MoMA PS1, New York, 2023, The Miracle on George Green, The High Line, New York, USA, 2022, a so-called archive, LUX, London, UK and THE REAL STORY IS WHAT’S IN THAT ROOM, Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada, 2021, There Were Two Brothers, Jerwood Arts, 2019, and Corrections, with Aliya Pabani, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Canada, 2018.

Jyoti Mistry, Born in Durban, South Africa in 1970, works with film as an interplay between cinematic traditions and installation art. Her films have screened at festivals including Toronto, Winterthur, Rotterdam and Durban and in exhibitions at Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Kunsthalle Wien. She has been artist in residence at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and was a member of the International Short Film Jury at the 68th Berlinale. She is currently professor for film at the University of Gothenburg.

Christian Nyampeta’s works investigate how individuals and communities negotiate forms of socially-organized violence. He creates fictions, models, dialogues, and commentaries concerned with the difficulties of being and living together. Nyampeta makes use of what he refers to as practical philosophy, or “poiesis of worlding.” This approach generates both singular and collective considerations toward our past, present, and future, with the hope to unveil new understandings that may relieve some of the anguish resulting from structural oppression.