Images Festival Presents: Struggle to Win

STRUGGLE TO WIN

“Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.” — Bernadette Devlin

This program focuses on women-led community organizing through from the present day gentrification of Brooklyn, to a South London community fighting for tenants voting rights in the late 80’s, and concludes with a portrait of a 21-year old Northern Irish civil rights activist during a period of ethno-nationalist conflict in the 70’s.

COMMUNITY ROOM
Amanda Katz, 5 minutes
Gently sets the stage. Shot on 16mm, the detached cinematic survey of an empty so-called “community room” at the bottom of a new condominium starkly contrasts the embodied resistance depicted in Ayo Akinbgade’s Street 66, and Duncan Campbell’s Bernadette.

STREET 66
Ayo Akingbade, 13 minutes
Street 66 portrays the campaign of Ghanian housing activist Dora Boatemah (1957-2001) for community control over the redevelopment of her housing estate, Angell Town, in resistance to the controversial 1988 Housing Bill.

BERNADETTE
Duncan Campbell, 37 minutes
Campbell follows Bernadette Devlin as she is elected to the House of Commons, takes her seat on the eve of her twenty-second birthday, and later punches the Home Secretary after being silenced in Parliament during a discussion of Bloody Sunday.

Against the systemic violence of inert bureaucracies that inform the direct violence of civil unrest, the works in this program offer visions of past and present struggles and victories that protect the futures through the uncompromising organizing of these women.

Programmed by Steffanie Ling

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Ayo Akingbade is an artist and film director based in London. Her 2016 film Tower XYZ received a Special Mention Award at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and won the inaugural Sonja Savić Award at Alternative Film/Video Festival (Belgrade). Akingbade’s films Tower XYZ (2016), Street 66 (2018), and Dear Babylon (2019) comprise the social housing trilogy entitled No News Today. She is a recipient of the Sundance Ignite Fellowship and exhibited in ‘New Contemporaries’. Akingbade is a graduate of London College of Communication and is currently studying at Royal Academy Schools.

Duncan Campbell (born 1972 in Dublin) received a BA from the University of Ulster in 1996 and an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art in 1998. Recent solo exhibitions include the self-titled show at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh in 2012; Arbeit at Hotel, London in 2011; and Make It New John, which was staged in 2009–11 at London’s Chisenhale Gallery, Glasgow’s Tramway, Sligo’s The Model, Belfast Exposed, and New York’s Artists Space. Campbell also participated in the British Art Show 7, which toured venues in Nottingham, London, Glasgow and Plymouth in 2010–11. In 2013 he participated in Scotland + Venice at the 55th Venice Biennale. He has been nominated for the 2014 Turner Prize. He lives and works in Glasgow.

Amanda Katz is a filmmaker drawing upon documentary, experimental, and performative modes to explore the intersection of the public and private, paying special attention to the way the built environment.

Steffanie Ling is Artistic Director of Images Festival.

Co-presented by Images Festival and Workers Arts and Heritage Centre