Black Lens unfolds as one long conversation ongoing over two days — an open work space to share forms and research interrogating the conditions of invention of safe spaces through gesture and narrative, code and body. Following on from the exhibition Op-Film: An Archaeology of Optics, Black Lens attempted to trace, within technologies of sight, the contours of minority ecologies, forms of life and of knowledge transmission. From humus to ocean, algorithm to creole, from surface to depth — where are new zones of conflict drawn out and where do they crystallize? Where can the voices we need to struggle with be written out and woven?

With : Erika Balsom, Zach Blas, Christa Blümlinger, Jephthé Carmil, The Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar), Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ciarán Finlayson, Ayesha Hameed, Onyeka Igwe, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Nadir Khanfour, Margarida Mendes, Olivier Marboeuf, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Arjuna Neuman, Rachel O’Reilly, Lorenzo Pezzani & Charles Heller, Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Concept : Filipa César, Louis Henderson & Olivier Marboeuf
Production : Khiasma in collaboration with Archive Kabinett (Berlin) & Spectre Productions
« Black Lens » is an associated programme of Cinéma du Réel Film Festival at Centre Pompidou.

With the support of the PERSPEKTIVE fund for contemporary art and architecture (an initiative of the Institut français’s Bureau des arts plastiques, supported by the French Ministry of Culture and the Goethe Institut) and Fluxus Art Projects.