At first glance, the two Super 8 films that comprise Ufuoma Essi’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) seem to compete for attention. “Bodies In Dissent” (2021) juxtaposes the artist’s footage of a performer with archival film of a 1960s jazz concert and a dancer in a succinct six minutes. On the opposite side of the gallery, “Half Memory” (2024) coalesces three years of filming in the United Kingdom, United States, and France into an allusive, nonlinear 27 minutes. Soon, though, the two works come to complement each other, their dreamlike atmospheres opening onto shared themes of history and memory threaded through with the voices of Black artists and intellectuals.
In “Bodies In Dissent,” Essi’s scenes of artist Nambi Kiyira performing in a grassy green field are interspersed with black and white video of then-married jazz drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln during a 1964 concert, and archival clips of dancer Loretta Abbott. Kiyira, wearing a long black dress, is seen alternately from afar and up close, backed by audio from the concert.
“Half Memory” takes Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory” (1986) and her concept of “rememory” — repressed memories returning via a living force — as a jumping-off point for an exploration of individual and collective memory and history. In it, grainy imagery of public places like cities and beaches — suggesting both anonymous found footage and surveillance videos — is layered with the words of Morrison and other Black feminist scholars.
Most online descriptions of Essi’s work, including her own artist statement, put forth a didactic portrait of the films (her website states that her art “revolves around Black feminist epistemology and the configuration of displaced histories”). These themes inhere in the references and connections she brings to light, but the films themselves are far more abstract and intuitive than academic and dry. The meditative pace and washed-out color palette of “Half Memory” reflect the ways that memories cohere, dissipate, and reemerge, while the pastoral setting of “Bodies In Dissent,” framing the performer’s elegant movements and form, renders the work lush and painterly.
The show’s location, in one of MoMA’s free ground-floor galleries, is a boon for art lovers who don’t have $30 to spend on a museum visit. Essi’s focus on music and landscape calls to mind some film works by Cauleen Smith (for instance, her 2017 ode to Alice Coltrane, “Pilgrim”). Smith’s more cinematic vision strikes a balance between abstraction and narrative that Essi’s works don’t quite achieve — and maybe weren’t meant to. But the artists are separated by a generation or more (Essi was born in 1995, three years before Smith released her feature film, Drylongso), and Essi’s aesthetic is still evolving.
Some contextualizing materials, such as archival texts or background on Roach and Lincoln’s activism through music, might have brought the show to another level. However, Essi’s great skill in these pieces lies in articulating her conceptual concerns through aesthetic and sensory means. “Half Memory” evokes the workings of memory and its relationship with official and repressed histories through its fluid montage, while “Bodies In Dissent” interweaves the past and present of Black arts and activism through music and the body. The effect is subtle, but it lingers.
Ufuoma Essi continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through October 13. The exhibition was organized by Gee Wesley.
