Fresh to Death: Gideon Appah Book Launch

Book launch and film screening: Forgotten, Nudes, Landscapes and Talking About Trees

Come celebrate the release of Gideon Appah: Forgotten, Nudes, Landscapes, a companion publication to the artist’s exhibition at the ICA last spring.

ICA Curator Amber Esseiva will introduce the book with a short talk on Gideon Appah, a Ghanaian artist best known for paintings of nightlife scenes that are rich with references to archival newspaper clippings, films, and event posters. Appah mines these sources to track how cinema and leisure culture at large have evolved from the end of Ghana’s colonial period through the 1980s. Forgotten, Nudes, Landscapes includes new essays as well as reproductions of his artworks (including a new, very different series commissioned for his ICA exhibition) to shed light on the artist’s process and situate his practice in a broader historical context.

Then, a guest appearance by filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer Akosua Adoma Owusu in conversation with film curator and scholar Alia Ayman about Owusu’s recent campaign to revive the Rex Cinema, one of Ghana’s oldest cinema houses, as an alternative creative space for art, music, and film The conversation is followed by a special screening of Sudanese director Suhaib Gasmelbari’s documentary Talking About Trees (2019). The film follows four members of the Sudanese Film Club, all of whom attended film school abroad then found themselves unable to make their own films for years. United by their love of cinema and desire to restore old films and draw attention to Sudanese film history, they decide to revive an old movie theater. Ayman selected the film in conversation with ICA curators to expand on Appah’s interest in following the rise of grand cinema houses in the 1950s and ’60s through more recent hardships faced by the cinema industry across the African continent.

PROGRAM

6:00PM – Reception
6.30PM – Amber Esseiva, ICA Curator, introduces Gideon Appah: Forgotten, Nudes, Landscapes
6.45PM – Alia Ayman, film curator, introduces Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees (2019)
7:00PM – Film Screening: Talking About Trees (2019) (93 min.)