Relations In Time: A Duets in Film and Performance

Blanc Gallery is delighted to close out our Inaugural Cinema Series with the launch of Relations In Time, a new series centered on conversations between artists working in time-based mediums. This initiative aims to cultivate a space for dialogue and exchange among artists who explore an array of time-based artforms, fostering an environment where they can delve deeper into their central artistic concerns and collaboratively open new creative portals.

The first iteration of Relations In Time will feature the black surrealist sci-fi film iwoyi: within the echo (2024) created by Tayo Rapoport and Rohan Ayinde in collaboration with Touching Bass. Originally presented as a 5-screen installation for Beyond The Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music at the British Library, Blanc Gallery will showcase the single-screen adaptation. Following the screening, artist Rohan Ayinde will engage in a conversation with Jalen Hamilton, delving into the film and his broader practice. The evening will conclude with a performance featuring BSA Gold and Rohan Ayinde, blending poetry, electronic music, flute, and more.

Join us for an evening rich in film, dialogue, and live music—a fitting conclusion to the Blanc Gallery Cinema Series that will inspire audiences to ponder how film programming can be as expansive and interdisciplinary as possible.

We look forward to welcoming you to an evening celebrating innovative cinema and artistic exploration.

iwoyi: within the echo (2024) takes viewers on a non-linear journey through time and space, driven by the vibrations of a Black radical imagination. Grounded in the traditions of Black ritual, the film explores themes of listening, gathering, refusal, and the transformative power of collaboration. Emerging from the mouth of a black hole, iwoyi invites you into a world untethered from the violent logics of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, envisioning liberation through the lens of Black feminism. Conceived of as a spaceship moving toward the event horizon, it challenges the destructive forces of our present reality, calling on us to embrace the unknown and actively push beyond the limits of this world to create new possibilities for freedom.

Orignally conceived of as an immersive, 5-screen, 16-minute symphony of image, feeling and sound, iwoyi weaves together original film, archival footage and an original score composed by Melo-Zed (Sundance, GUCCI, Lionheart/Venice Biennale, Obongjayar, 180 Strand, Gabriel Moses, Ego Ella May) to tell its story.

The single-screen version dances in the footsteps of the original work, translating the story into a 9-minute journey and creating a new point of departure and arrival for the film's ideas.

The project marks Touching Bass’ debut exploration of the film and art installation creative mediums proper. A development on previous, creative collaborations with the likes of White Cube (Frieze London), Lisson Gallery (with Devon OJAS) and Jenn Nkiru (Black To Techno, 2019). iwoyi: within the echo was commissioned by Dr Aleema Gray and premiered at the British Library as part of Beyond the Bassline (26 April – 26 August 2024); the first major exhibition to document the 500-year musical history of African and Caribbean people in Britain. Inspired by the British Library’s sound archive, the exhibition explored the people, spaces and genres that have transformed the landscape of British music.

Tayo Rapoport is an artist and filmmaker. His practice intimately observes the intersections between community, healing, creativity and our relationship with the natural and spiritual worlds. Grounded in the works of black cinema and the use of film as an expansion of oral history and archive. Embedded at the core is the question: how can the the screen become a space that brings us together and creates human connection?

Commissions include the meditative art film Spirit Moves (V&A, 2021), which manifests as a visual tone poem rooted in Senegalese and Afro-Brazilian traditions to uplift the Black diaspora. Rose of Jericho (2021) is an immersive live performance in collaboration with Touching Bass and The White Cube, developed in response to ‘Ibrahim Mahama: Lazarus’, an exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey reviving the ecosystem of a disused silo space in Tamale, Ghana.

Rohan Ayinde is an anadisciplinary artist and poet based between London and Chicago. Ayinde’s work traverses audio, visual and literary forms and often embraces installation and performance. Through an entanglement with the phenomenon of the black hole, his/their practice attempts to excavate an architecture of ideology through the analytical framework of black feminist thought. Investigating how the politics of place intersects with the conceptual, their poems, drawings, videos and performance work are translations and sketches of landscapes built from a freedom best imagined by writers like Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Lola Olufemi and Edouard Glissant.

Ayinde is one half of the wayward/motile collaborative duo i.as.in.we, with friend/producer/dancer Yewande YoYo Odunubi. He received his MA in Visual and Critical Studies from SAIC (2019) and is currently the Director at Blanc gallery (Chicago). Ayinde is part of the inaugural cohort of the Rose Choreographic School and a 2024 CIRCA Prize finalist with Tayo Rapoport

Jalen Hamilton is a Chicago-based artist specializing in printmaking, textiles, and digital media. Inspired by the rich visual history of his family’s archive, Hamilton merges the image based practices of silkscreen, filmmaking and photography to reflect on connections between his family’s history and contemporary narratives of Black existence.

As an archivist and oral historian, Hamilton incorporates historical documents and family photographs into experimental works on fabric, revitalized home interior, and nontraditional surfaces. Through his process of collage and texture, Hamilton seeks to highlight the depth and complexity of family narratives and invite viewers to engage with their own sense of self and heritage. Hamilton sees the work of archiving one's family history, image and stories as part of a recuperative process to create scripts from which new futures might be constructed.

BSA Gold is a Chicago-based flutist and producer. She explores themes of spirituality, love, and self-understanding through electronics and instruments.

Host or Publisher Blanc Gallery