The Visions and Images of Koyo Kouoh

The African Film Institute is pleased to invite you to e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, April 14, 2026, at 7pm for The Visions and Images of Koyo Kouoh, followed by a conversation. The event is organized as part of the film series convened by Christian Nyampeta for the African Film Institute and e-flux Screening Room.

Organized with the support of RAW Material Company, the program is dedicated to the memory of the late Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh and reflects on her far-reaching contributions to new ways of learning, memory, and commemoration. In particular, the evening engages Kouoh’s pedagogical project RAW Académie, the experimental program for the research and study of artistic and curatorial practice and thought developed within RAW Material Company, the center for art, knowledge, and society that Kouoh founded in Dakar in 2008. The program draws on RAW Académie Session 7, “Images pour notre temps” (“Images for our time”) (2019), led by Éric Baudelaire, and Session 9, “Infrastructure” (2022), led by Linda Goode Bryant. It brings together works by fellows from the two sessions, including Noor Abed, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun, Rehema Chachage, Lina Laraki, Hira Nabi, Shirin Sabahi, Sanaz Sohrabi, and Tako Taal. The screening will conclude with a presentation of Pour Koyo (2025), a film by Éric Baudelaire produced in memory of Koyo Kouoh, followed by a conversation between Baudelaire and Linda Goode Bryant, after which food and drinks will be served, accompanied by music from a collective playlist.

This program is organized with the support of RAW Material Company. The films featured are works by fellows from the two sessions. It continues Two Thousand Seasons, the 2026 programming of African Film Institute, driven by methods of collective study and collaborative action, and pointing to alternative sites where memory is held and where learning is made. Moving between the film image and practices beyond the screen, the programming samples transitional ways of recording histories and practicing commemoration, foregrounding inspiration as both a lesson and a tool for loosening the grip of manipulation characteristic of the world today.

Program

Noor Abed, our songs were ready for all wars to come (2021, 22 minutes)
The film presents choreographed scenes based on documented folk tales from Palestine. It begins with four minutes of darkness and the haunting sound of a woman’s voice. The perforated edge of the film, occasionally silhouetted by flashes of light, highlights the nature of the work as a mediated document.

Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun, Dakar, reel I; Dakar, reel II; Dakar, reel III (2019, 7 minutes)
The three reels presented in this part of the ongoing project Travelogue to Uncanny Landsare a visual exercise on shifting perspectives and unlearning the gaze toward imagined lands. Shot in Super 8 and edited in-camera, the footage reflects on the most Western tip of the African continent and its elements from a subjective perspective, trying to breathe silently together with the land and its people.

Rehema Chachage, Kwa Baba rithi undugu (2010, 3 minutes)
Part of a larger installation project, the work reflects on voice and voicelessness through radio-like forms, interrupted transmissions, and the difficulty of relating to another in the absence of speech.

Lina Laraki, The Last Observer (2020, 11 minutes)
The Last Observer is a film from beyond the future and the past merged together. We are talking about a new world in which plants and technology dominate, where we can finally know what a plant has to say. After all human life has disappeared from Earth, a bored artificial intuition connects to non-human life. A plant is having a recurring dream about a “last observer” and recounts this strange dream in a dystopian narrative.

Hira Nabi, excerpt from Sunsets for S (2024, 73 minutes)
An excerpt from a larger work structured around sunsets denied to a miner named S, turning a seemingly universal horizon into an image of labor, estrangement, and the unequal distribution of visibility.

Shirin Sabahi, Casino Blooms (2026, 3 minutes)
Set in the final days of Expo 2025 Osaka, the film lingers on a flowering landscape that already contains its disappearance, as the site is poised to be dismantled and transformed into a gambling complex.

Shirin Sabahi, Nowshahr (2024, 6 minutes)
Nowshahr (a collaboration with Marcel Heise) was shot en route and in the eponymous town, whose name—meaning “new town” in Farsi— was adopted about a century ago with the arrival of the port. Nowshahr bears the traces of rapid, speculative development: abandoned construction sites, empty plots, and a surplus of holiday homes, alongside fewer permanent residents than the port and its successive booms once promised. Along the shoreline, the effects of a growing water crisis and the shift from agricultural land to holiday housing become visible, situating the film at a meeting point between transience and suspended ambition.

Sanaz Sohrabi, excerpt from Scenes of Extraction (2023, 43 minutes)
Between 1901 and 1951, the British-controlled oil operations in Iran expanded their geological expeditions and geophysical methods for locating commercially viable oil reserves across its entire oil concession. Scenes of Extraction takes the viewer on an archival stroll into the British Petroleum Archives to unearth the still and moving images that documented this expansive colonial network of geological explorations that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil concessions in Papua and Southeast Asia.

Tako Taal, departures (2021, 4 minutes)
A poetic meditation on absence and distance in which the camera traces the artist’s naming blanket while a poem by her late father is recited by his brothers across two continents.

Éric Baudelaire, Pour Koyo (2025, 24 minutes)
Pour Koyo is an anthology film made of voices, poems, photographs, songs, and videos made and recorded by family members, friends, and close collaborators of Koyo Kouoh, spanning decades and testifying to a life dedicated to the lessening of the distances between the plurality of Black life across the world. It features voices by Otobong Nkanga; Ami Weickaane; and Rasha Salti, and images by Mati Diop; Otobong Nkanga; Wim van Dongen; Phil Mall; Siddhartha Mitter; Lina Laraki; Ami Weickaane; Rasha Salti; Adrienne Edwards; Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo; Tuan Andrew Nguyen; Sophie Thun; Djibril Drame; Marie-Hélène Pereira; and the RAW Amazons.

Find more about the African Film Institute here. For inquiries addressed to the African Film Institute, please write to [email protected].

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Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

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