Akosua Adoma OWUSU

Drexciya Experimental video, Video | dv, DVcam | color | 11'30'' | USA / Ghana | 2010 A portrait of an abandoned public swimming facility located in Accra, Ghana. The Riviera was once known as Ghana`s first pleasure beach. A one-time extravagant Ambassador Hotel of postcolonial - early Kwame Nkrumah era, the Riviera Beach Club thrived until the mid-1970`s. The Olympic-sized pool, now in a dilapidated state, is used for locals for things other than swimming. Akosua Adoma Owusu (b. 1/1/1984) is an award-winning filmmaker and artist of Ghanaian descent. She received her MFA in the Schools of Film & Video and Fine Art at the California Institute of the Arts, and her BA at the University of Virginia. Owusu`s short film “Me Broni Ba” (“My White Baby”) garnered critical acclaim with screenings at over 60 international film festivals including Rotterdam, the BFI London Film Festival, Visions du Reel, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cannes Film Festival at Short Film Corner. The film ranked #6 in Art Forum’s Top Ten in 2010 and earned several Best Documentary awards, including a Golden Gate Award nomination in New Visions at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival. Following the success of "Me Broni Ba," Owusu`s next short work, “Drexciya”, was inspired by a myth of the Detroit-based techno band. It was praised at the 2011 Tarifa African film festival ‘for its radical nature’ and ‘poetic insight’ and went on to win Best Experimental Film at the Expresion en Corto Film Festival in Guanajuato, Mexico. Shortly after graduating from CalArts, she was the youngest of 42 black conceptual artists included in the group exhibition, 30 Seconds Off an Inch, at the famed Studio Museum in Harlem, where she also exhibited solo video projects. Her videos have shown at art venues including the National Gallery of Art, Transformer Gallery, BOZAR in Brussels, LA Freewaves, New Langton Arts, Vox Populi, Spaces Gallery, and The Luggage Store Gallery. She was also a featured artist at the 56th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Owusu`s professional experiences include Development and Production internships at Echo Lake Productions and HBO Films. For the latter, she received an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences grant to provide post-production assistance on Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair. She has participated as a directing talent at the Berlinale Film Festival’s Talent Campus and the Durban Talent Campus in South Africa. One of five recipients and the first Ghanaian to receive the award, Owusu will be funded by Focus Features` Africa First Program to direct a short film entitled KWAKU ANANSE, an adaptation of a traditional Ghanaian folktale mixed with live action and animation. She is currently developing her first feature, “Black Sunshine”, which was invited to participate at the “Produire au Sud” workshop in 2010 and the Amiens Script and Screenplay Development Fund in 2011. The feature is an international co-production with Owusu’s company, Obibini Pictures, musician Salif Keita, his Salif Keita Foundation, and Arizona Films based in France. Artist statement Drexciya is connected to a several part installation inspired by sound and techno programming theories discussed by Kodwo Eshun in his text, More Brilliant than the Sun. Social myths about swimming in Black communities, fear of water, and the womb are central metaphors to this video. Like my past film projects, Drexciya references the connection between people of African and Black American descent. The video is an experimental exploration of swimming and an absurd social construct of buoyancy issues in Black American and urban communities. The Middle Passage was the center of the triangular trade in which Africans were taken to the New World. Goods were exchanged for purchased or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves. An underground Detroit-based band of the same name conceived the futuristic myth of Drexciya. The myth is about an underwater subcontinent populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off slave ships that had adapted to breathe underwater in their mother`s wombs. I included the Negro spiritual “Wade in the Water” in the film, Drexciya because it was sung at many slave baptisms. The slaves chanted “Wade in the water/wade in the water, chillum/Wade in the water/God’s gonna trouble the water.” This song had coded messages about escaping slavery. Fugitive slaves would also run through streams and creeks which made their scents undetectable to confound the hounds. I am a Black woman mixed of Ghanaian and American cultures. I also have a fear of swimming. Drexciya is now an empty aquatic world waiting for a touch of life or the movement of troubled water. Other text “A portrait of the abandoned swimming pool of a ruined hotel in Ghana, the visuals document the uses people put to failed capitalist fantasies while also exploring the relation of the cinematic and how consciousness “intends” its object. The title’s allusion to the myth of an underwater kingdom of the children thrown from slave ships creates a bond between the endurance of the Ghanian people and counterhistorical resistance against the legacy of slavery.” - Expresion en Corto, Guanajuato, Mexico "for the radical nature of the project, its effective use of limited economic resources and its poetic insight." - Africa Film Festival of Tarifa, Spain Guilty landscape. A carefully observed decrepit swimming pool, silently relates a myth from Africa`s traumatic history. Based on a myth about an undersea continent as told in music by the Detroit band Drexciya. The primarily visual images are related to an experimental film tradition of observation. The result is an intense look at a piece of Africa with a visible colonial past. – 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam Praised at the 2011 Tarifa African film festival ‘for the radical nature of the project’ and its ‘poetic insight’, this short film is a stunning, eerie portrait of an abandoned Olympic-sized public swimming pool in Accra, Ghana, set on “The Riviera” – Ghana’s first pleasure beach. - Film Africa 2011 List of exhibition, filmography... filmography SHORTS Drexciya (2010) ∑ Best Experimental Short, Expresion en Corto, 2011 ∑ Special Mention, Tarifa Africa Film Festival, 2011 ∑ Official Selection, IFFR, 2011 ∑ Studio Museum at Harlem, 2010 ∑ Official Selection, IndieLisboa, 2011 ∑ Official Selection, Huesca International Film Festival, 2011 ∑ Official Selection, Viennale, 2011 Me Broni Ba (My White Baby)(2009) is a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi, Ghana. The tangled legacy of European colonialism in Africa is evoked through images of women practicing hair braiding on discarded white baby dolls from the West. The film unfolds through a series of vignettes, set against a child`s story of migrating from Ghana to the United States. The film uncovers the meaning behind the Akan term of endearment, me broni ba, which means "my white baby." ∑ Best Documentary, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 2009 ∑ Best Documentary, Athens Film & Video Festival, 2009 ∑ Special Mention, Real Life Documentary Festival 2010 ∑ Golden Gate Award Nomination, San Francisco International Film Festival, 2009 ∑ World Premiere, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, 2009 ∑ International Premiere, Visions du Reel, 2009 ∑ Official Selection, IFFR, 2010 ∑ Official Selection, CPH:DOX, 2009 ∑ Official Selection, Festival des 3 Continents, 2009 ∑ Official Selection, DOK Leipzig, 2009 ∑ Official Selection, BFI Times London Film Festival, 2009 ∑ Official Selection, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, 2009 ∑ Official Selection, AFI/SilverDocs Documentary Festival, 2009 ∑ Official Selection, SFC at Festival des Cannes, 2010 ∑ Official Selection, Ambulante Documentary Film Festival, 2010 ∑ Official Selection, New York African Film Festival, 2010 ∑ National Gallery of Art, 2011 Intermittent Delight (2007) "The intersection of identity and cultural appropriation is at the heart of Akosua Adoma Owusu`s video Intermittent Delight (2007). This carefully constructed work juxtaposes close-ups of batik textiles, fashion and design from the 1950s and 1960s, images of men weaving and women sewing in Ghana, and fragments of a Westinghouse 1960s commercial—aimed to instruct women on the how-to of refrigerator decoration. Constructed from a combination of 1960s Afrobeat, traditional Asante Adwa music, and field recordings of West African men and women during production of cloths and garments, the soundtrack designed by Kari Rae Seekins pulls the piece together and imbues it with a jolty and festive tone. The work touches upon the idea of feminism`s uneven geographical and historical development, and the nuances of labor conditions women face depending on where they live." - New Langton Arts ∑ Vox Populi, 2010 ∑ Studio Museum at Harlem, 2010 ∑ Official Selection, Viennale, 2008 ∑ New Langton Arts, 2010 ∑ Official Selection, Detroit Docs, 2007 ∑ Official Selection, Flex, 2008 ∑ RedCat, screening 2007