A Film Screening and Video Installation Exploring the Spectral Legacies of African National Cinemas
Join us at G.A.S. Lagos from 19–21 June 2025 for AfterImages, a series of film installations and screenings developed as part of the Art Exchange: Moving Image programme. Curated by Monangambee, AfterImages interrogates the coloniality of archival moving images. Drawing upon the histories of specifically Cameroonian and more broadly Global South cinemas, these works show how archival and experimental filmic registers can complicate our understanding of the residual and the spectral in the midst and aftermath of colonial violence. The cinematic afterimage becomes both method and metaphor: a trace that refuses disappearance, a remnant that unsettles the authority of linear time and official (colonial) memory.
AfterImages asks how histories are made visible, audible, and thinkable through film, drawing from archival fragments, cultural residues such as music, gesture, and choreography, and the spectral recursions of radical cinematic turns once thought lost. These works challenge the fixity of the archive, offering instead a space where the material and the memorial coexist in entanglement. They undo the binary between what can be seen and what is remembered, reworking cinema into a spatio-temporal zone of (un)folding, looping and resistance to closure. Here, gaps or absences are not interpreted as lack but rather as openings with the potential for fabulation, speculation, or what Toni Morrison calls “rememory.” To this effect, AfterImages foregrounds an ethics of attention: to what lingers in the archive, what recurs, and what has been made difficult to see.
Event Details
This event spans three days that require individual RSVPs. If you would like to attend all, kindly register for each slot seperetely.
Date: 19th - 21st June, 2025
Day One: 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Day Two: 1:00pm - 5:00pm
Day Three: 5:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: 9b, Hakeem Dickson Drive, off T.F. Kuboye Road, Oniru, Lagos
Day One
1:00pm - Exhibition Opens
2:00pm - Exhibition Walkthrough
5:00pm - Exhibition ends
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Day Two
1:00pm - Exhibition Opens [no walkthrough]
5:00pm - Exhibition ends
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Day Three
5:00pm - Film Screenings
8:00pm - Monangambee curators discuss the aesthetic and political histories/consequences of archival cinema alongside scholar, curator and current G.A.S. resident Tinase Mushakavanhu
9:00pm - Session ends
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Film still. THE STATES OF THINGS, (Rosalind Nashashibi, 2000). Image courtesy of LUX.
Programme Details
Installation
The installation features works by:
- Erika Tan
- Rosalind Nashashibi
- Goddy Leye
- Matthew Kleyebe Abonnenc
- Eugenie Metala & Jean-Marie Téno
- Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa
Projection
a. Ghost Cinemas
Ghost Cinemas considers the traces left behind by certain filmmakers—figures whose contributions persist in archival records and personal memory yet remain elusive within the material culture of film, where works are continuously shared, reproduced, or restored. This section examines the gaps and absences that shape cinematic history.
Goddy Leye (1965–2011) was a Cameroonian multimedia artist and filmmaker whose work explored the postcolonial condition. A pioneering figure in contemporary African art, Leye was deeply invested in the intersection of film and conceptual art, often interrogating the mechanisms of representation and erasure. Despite his influence, much of Leye’s oeuvre remains difficult to access.
Thérèse Sita-Bella (1933–2006) was a Cameroonian filmmaker and journalist, often credited as one of Africa’s first female directors. Her 1963 documentary Tam Tam à Paris—which followed a Cameroonian dance troupe in France—was among the earliest films made by an African woman, yet it has largely disappeared from public view, with only fragmented references—one-line sentences and footnotes—to its existence.
Sarah Maldoror (1929 - 2020) was a French filmmaker and director whose oeuvre of rebellious work is made up of fiction, documentary, and poetry. She was considered a leading figure in African cinema and the first female director on the continent.
Revisiting these artists, Ghost Cinemas raises critical questions about access to and utility of the archive.
Films:
- Sita-Bella, The First, 2025, Eugenie Metala & Jean-Marie Teno
- Foreword to Guns for Banta, 2011, Matthew Kleyebe Abonnenc
- The Beautiful Beast, 2009, Goddy Leye
- Misery, 2002, Goddy Leye
- We are the world, 2006, Goddy Leye
- The Bone Collector, 2001, Goddy Leye
- The Story, 2001, Goddy Leye
b. AfterImages: Conversation
Following the first caché of projected films, Monangambee curators discuss the aesthetic and political histories/consequences of archival cinema alongside the scholar and curator, Tinase Mushakavanhu before a live audience.
c. Residual Images
This section revisits the work of Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, one of Cameroon’s most influential filmmakers, whose films vividly depict the cultural and political shifts of post-independence Africa. Produced in the 1970s and 1980s—Muna Moto marking its 50th anniversary—these works remain vital touchpoints in African cinema.
Film:
- Muna Moto, 1975, Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa
ABOUT MONANGAMBEE
Monangambee (formerly Is That Jazz) is a nomadic panafrican microcinema in Lagos, primarily based at the Jazzhole bookstore in Ikoyi, but also screening in a variety of other locations. Our screenings engage Black continental and diasporic filmmakers, as well as Third Cinema, and cinematic movements stemming from the Global South in general. We try as much as possible to have the filmmakers present, in person or virtually, as the screenings are followed by discussions.
ABOUT ART EXCHANGE: MOVING IMAGE
The Art Exchange: Moving Image programme is a collaborative and cross-cultural curatorial professional development and exhibition programme for early to mid-career visual arts curators from Sub-Saharan Africa working with moving image. The programme is supported by the British Council and organised by LUX, the UK agency for the support and promotion of artists working with moving image, Yinka Shonibare Foundation and Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, Nigeria.
Header Image: Film still, MUNA MOTO (Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa, 1975). Image. courtesy of Doc Films Chicago.
The programme is supported by the British Council and organised by LUX, Yinka Shonibare Foundation and Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation.
