FREEDOM
Martin Luther King and the
‘fierce urgency of the now’
Video installations by Ian McDonald
and Geetha J
University of Brighton Gallery,
Grand Parade
5th-20th May 2018
Exhibition open Tuesdays to Sundays: 12.00 to 6.00pm
On 4th April 1968, 50 years ago, the civil rights and anti-racism campaigner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead on his balcony at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.
The University of Brighton is pleased to present a video exhibition celebrating King’s legacy, and registering its relevance for today.
King’s legacy
Martin Luther King had been at the centre of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA for two decades when he was killed. It was a movement that had secured significant changes in federal and state legislation but had not achieved the eradication of institutionalised racism. King’s legacy is one of uncompromising commitment to a continuing campaign against discrimination on racial grounds, whether that discrimination is constitutional, legislative or institutional. This activism, focused on changes in the law, was seen by King as a critical part of eradicating the racist attitudes that had been embedded in Western culture as a consequence of centuries of slavery and slave-trading, and centuries of oppression and colonial exploitation by the imperialist powers of Western Europe. In the USA, this racism remained, then and now, deeply ingrained in every aspect of North American life, moulded into the fabric of that culture by the dependence of US development, North and South, on a foundation in slavery.
The exhibition
This timely exhibition, together with the thousands of other tributes in the USA and in Europe to King’s life and work, coincides with a renewed focus on the continuing racist consequences of slavery and exploitation. This year is also 50th anniversary of the infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech by the racist Tory MP, Enoch Powell, and it is the 25th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence on 22nd April 1993 by a gang of white youths in London, most of whom have not been brought to justice as a result of institutional racism and corruption inthe Metropolitan Police. The exhibition comes in the wake of the nation-wide #blacklivesmatter campaign against the pattern of systematic police killing of young black men in the USA, and the development of a similar campaign in the UK over the deaths of black men in police custody. It coincides with the ‘Windrush scandal’ – the racist treatment of British citizens from the Caribbean who came to work in the UK in the 1950s. They and their children have faced deportation and denial of health and other services because of lost papers by the Home Office, the arbitrary and racist redefinition of British citizenship in 1971, and the climate of hostility towards immigrants created by previous British governments towards all migrants, whether British or European citizens with a right to settle in the UK, or towards asylum seekers.
The ‘now’
Today, racist and xenophobic attitudes are no less threatening than they were in 1968. Arguably, they are more dangerous now in the febrile climate created by the election of President Trump, and the racism that came into the open after the Brexit vote in the UK referendum. Today, this racist attitude continues to be directed at black people in Britain and the USA but it is also now targeted at asylum seekers, at migrants, and at the Muslim communities in the West.
The installations
Freedom by Ian McDonald and Geetha J is a two-part installation. The first part is a three-screen exhibit that intersects footage of King’s acceptance speech in the UK, on the occasion of his honorary degree award from the University of Newcastle in 1967, and newsreel footage of Powell’s notorious visit to Newcastle in the same year, with footage of contemporary protest movements against racism, austerity and exclusion in New York and London in 2017. The second part is contemporary footage in a single-screen exhibit of the coastline and seascape of Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin) at the southernmost tip of India, and site of an important Gandhi memorial. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, visited this site in 1959 as part of a 5-week tour of India. Anti-Racism, Feminism and Anti-Imperialism – the Legacy of 1968 is an extended video interview with Tariq Ali (activist, broadcaster, novelist and playwright) by Tom Hickey and Kevin Reynolds. It will be shown on continuous loop adjacent to the exhibition’s reading room.
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About the filmmakers
Ian McDonald and Geetha J are award-winning filmmakers whose works confront the political and the personal, surprising viewers with unusual visual richness, distinct take on a subject and humanity of treatment. Acclaimed internationally for their Grierson-nominated feature documentary Algorithms (2012, 100mins) about young blind chess players from India, they have worked across a range of forms from short experimental to feature docs. Their films have screened at film festivals, galleries, campaign-meetings and in cinemas around the world.
FREEDOM is the latest in a long series of filmic collaborations between Ian as director and Geetha as producer. Originally exhibited at The Great North Museum Hancock in Newcastle as part of the Freedom City 2017, FREEDOM is their first work for the gallery space, and furthers their quest to explore and expand the expressive boundaries of cinematic documentary practice. Ian McDonald is the founder-director of Film@CultureLab at Newcastle University. Geetha Jayaraman is a filmmaker from India and Lecturer in Film Praxis in Film@CultureLab.
FREEDOM
22min three-screen installation
plus a 10min single screen installation
Director: Ian McDonald
Producer: Geetha J
Camera and Editing: Ian McDonald
Postproduction supervisor: Ajithkumar B
Sound mixing: Harikumar N
Colour correction: Matt Robinson
Grateful Acknowledgements:
University of Brighton
Great North Museum: Hancock
Arts Council of England
North East Film Archive
Film@Culture Lab, Newcastle University
Media Mill Production Studio, Kerala, India
AkamPuram, Kerala, India
©Interventions 2017
