Join us for an exciting evening of film and conversation with Rebecca Bellantoni, winner of the Women of Colour Art Award 2022-3. Experience the captivating short film ‘you have any peace for me? C.R.Y’ (2022), followed by a Q&A with WOCAA: Resonance curators Languid Hands.
Date: Thu Aug 03 2023 | Time: 7-8.30pm | Location: 198 Railton Road, London, SE24 0JT
you have any peace for me? C.R.Y was commissioned by Metroland Cultures for inclusion in the 2022 Brent Biennale. The film reflects on specific experiences of the hostile environment and the trauma it inflicts, alongside the dissolution of a community Bellantoni was a part of when growing up, who had embraced Rastafari as both a spiritual way of life and a political lens through which to view the world. In this work, Bellantoni celebrates the love and learning that can extend from being part of a community, whilst simultaneously considering the ways trauma can be held within it, focusing on both literal and symbolic journeys that can be taken towards individual healing and community regeneration.
Rebecca Bellantoni (b.1981) is a London-based artist who draws from everyday occurrences and abstracts them. Investigating, through the layered lens of Black women’s writing (fiction and nonfiction), metaphysics, comparative theology, philosophy, religion and spirituality and the aesthetics of them; she gently prises apart the concept of the accepted/expected ‘real’ and the experiential ‘real’; looking at how these removed borders may offer meditative experiences and portals to self, collective reasoning and healing thought and action.
Bellantoni’s current research and making project C.R.Y: Concrete Regenerative Yearnings, thinks about the city, its multiple worlds, its materials (industrial and natural), in relation to the psyche, soul and body of the city dweller. Her research is inspired by Katherine McKittrick’s idea of Black women’s geography, created through the negotiations of space, place and lived experience and Edouard Glissant’s writing on the role of the landscape and built environment on the psyche and cultural production of a colonised people. Her practice is wide ranging and encompasses moving image, installation, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, sound-text and ceramics.
Recent works have been presented at/with In the house of my love, Brent Biennial (London, UK, 2022); Frieze live (London, UK, 2021); Aggregates, Ausstellungsraum Klingental (Switzerland, 2021); Coalition of Care, PUBLICs (Helsinki, Finland, 2019); La Manutention, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France, 2019; in collaboration with Rowdy SS).