Baldwin’s Nigger Reloaded II
Saturday 5 May 2018 6.30 – 8pm

TICKETS are free but essential and booking is via eventbrite

For the final event in Polygraphs you are invited to join artist Barby Asante and sorryyoufeeluncomfortable for a performance in response to Horace Ove’s film Baldwin’s Nigger, 1969 – a documentary of James Baldwin and Dick Gregory discussing the Civil Rights Movement in 1960s Great Britain.

In conversation with a number of local people involved in arts and cultural work, social justice and activism, Asante and sorryyoufeeluncomfortable will rework the script for Baldwin’s Nigger forming the basis for a performance which engages with many issues we are facing at this time in history and how James Baldwin’s writings and thinking resonate with society today. The performance will be a dialogic re-enactment reflecting on the relevance and significance of Ove’s film, Baldwin’s words and how this piece as document resonates with our contemporary experience. This will be in the Polygraphs exhibition at GoMA, and tickets to attend the performance are available through Eventbrite.

Baldwin’s Nigger Reloaded II is held on the last weekend of Glasgow International 2018 and is part of Polygraphs at GoMA builds on a touring national project, BNR II, which has been performed at Nottingham Contemporary, October Gallery in London, and Eastside Projects in Birmingham, TATE Liverpool and was supported by Arts Council England. It has also been performed at the 2015 International James Baldwin Conference, A Place to Dwell in, at the American University of Paris and Art Rotterdam. The performance is a development from a project created in 2014 with artist Barby Asante and curator Teresa Cisneros at Iniva with the sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective. The project took the form of an event organised with members of the collective that incorporated an exhibition, display of archival material, discussion workshops, screenings of Baldwin’s Nigger and performances.

Barby Asante is a London Based artist, curator, educator and occasional DJ. Her work is concerned with the politics of place, space, identity and the histories and legacies of colonialism. Making work that is collaborative, performative and dialogic, she has created works that consider migration, safe spaces to gather in cities antagonistic to ones presence and how one maps the self as a contributor to narratives of society, culture and politics.

sorryyoufeeluncomfortable is a group of thinkers, makers, and activists using arts practices to interrogate dominate discourses and structures. They do this through publications, events, conversations and exhibitions

Polygraphs is drawn from Glasgow Museums’ Collection and includes artists who interrogate dominant historical narratives about our connections to the arms trade, colonialism, the slave trade and feminism. It poses questions about the relationship of museums to the histories, identities and politics that they reflect and by redisplaying older works alongside more recent pieces the exhibition reactivates truths and fictions still relevant today.