Guardian Angel by Olukemi Lijadu
April 22-28, 2023
A Guardian Angel is finally coming home. After touring the world, she is making her grand return to the land of her birth--Lagos, Nigeria. Come celebrate! Olukemi Lijadu's visionary film is concerned with journeys, of the spiritual kind, yes, as its title would suggest, but also of the transition from life into death, through its moving homage to the filmmaker's late grandmother, and lastly the various crossings made by members of the ‘black diaspora.’ But no journey is complete without a return. In that way, the film's Lagos screening acts out the ideas which form the artwork's central motivations.
Olukemi’s Lijadu’s work takes a careful look at African and, in particular, Nigerian epistemologies. She is interested in the ways of knowing employed by Africans that have been dismissed and looked down on. But she refuses to deal in abstraction; her film is anchored by its close examination of personhood, the body and the responsibilities that attend to being in community and connected with those around you (both living and dead). In Guardian Angel, Black womanhood is envisioned as a kind of philosophical practice, one invested in grasping the nature of God, religion, particularly Catholicism and how colonial histories have shaped African understandings of the spiritual. Lijadu makes space for contradiction and unanswered questions.
Guardian Angel feels like watching a prayer unfold on screen. It is a quiet meditation featuring footage of the artist’s grandmother interwoven with material recorded in Lagos, Dakar and London, as well as found videos and personal archival imagery. Collage-like in appearance, the work includes dreamy images from the studio cuts to still shots of Nigerian landscapes, written text, angelic statues, and excerpts from music videos, TV interviews with African philosophers and colonial missionaries. The film is also multi-sensory. Lijadu makes use of draped fabrics reminiscent of altar pieces in Catholic churches intended to evoke the feeling that you are in a place of worship. For the Lagos screening she will employ Yoruba sanyan fabric for the installation, fusing indigenous textile traditions with the visual language of European Christianity.
Olukemi Lijadu is an artist and DJ focusing on moving image and sound. She uses the power of cinema to take listeners on sonic journeys weaving between cultures and time. Her academic training as a philosopher deeply informs her experimental approach to music and the moving image. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy from Stanford University, where she focused on African philosophical systems.
For Kem Kem, music and music history are a living archive of communal memory and lost connections - critical given the fractured history of the Black diaspora worldwide. With heritage from Nigeria, the Caribbean and Brazil, the impetus of her artistic practice is both personal and political. She sees her function as a filmmaker and DJ as one of re-connection. As a DJ she has opened for artists such as Tems and has played across three continents.
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This event forms part of Water Laboratory: Experiments in Swimming and Drowning – a space of artistic experimentation and creative ideation that explores the watery disruptions and connections of people of African descent. Curated by Tracian Meikle during the second half of her curatorial residency at the Treehouse, it takes the form of a series of performances, presentations, installations and conversations; with the aim of learning what water does together.
