Adrian L Burrell, The Saints Step in Kongo Time
Aideen Barry, Possession
Join us for the screening of two short films, Possesion by artist Aideen Barry and The Saints Step in Kongo Time by artist and filmmaker Adrian L Burrell with panel discussion led by Future Tense Curator Peggy Sue Amison and learn more about the process and ideas behind making these short films first hand from the artists.
Possesion Aidden Barry which responds to the notion of being possessed or haunted in some way. Her protagonist is a creature that reflects cognitive dissonance, a housewife who succumbs to a morbid set of circumstances. Trapped in a modern House of Usher, the character responds to her environment, her appliances, her household obligation through absurd gesture that defy reality, and darkly humorous phenomenological reasoning, that plays on our perceptions of the everyday experience of modern living.
The Saints Step in Kongo Time by artist and filmmaker Adrian L Burrell which is an ongoing archival research project in the form of a short film that documents Burrell’s family’s experiences with plantocracy and sugar production after the Louisiana Purchase. For Burrell, the math and commodification of Black life and labour is the basis of modernity. Burrell’s Family’s migration from Jim Crow Louisiana to modern-day Oakland, and the powerful matriarch at the centre of this vast extended family, are at the centre of Burrell’s work. His art is spontaneously motivated toward healing the past as well as realising the not-yet-imagined to the present and future. The Saints Step in Kongo Time functions as a collective portrait that dispels the myth of the American Dream.
Adrian L. Burrell is a storyteller who uses photography, film, and site-specific installation to examine issues of race, class, and intergenerational dynamics. His work focuses on notions of kinship, diasporic narratives, and the gaps between place and belonging. Burrell’s artistic practice draws deeply on his family history, often combining interviews, video, and archival materials to trace their multigenerational journey from Louisiana to Oakland, California. Burrell’s short film, “The Game God(S)” was awarded Best Documentary Short at the BlackStar Film Festival in 2022. His work has also been acquired for the permanent collection at San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art.
Aideen Barry is a visual artist based in Ireland with an international profile. Her work encompasses a vast range of disciplines and subjects, including domestic labour, environmental changes, classism, intersectionality, and human vulnerability as a way to consider invisible and sinister systems. Her means of expression are interchangeable, incorporating performance, sculpture, film, text and experimental lens based media. She is a member of Aosdána and the Royal Hibernian Academy.
decontemporary.org/saints-step-in-kongo-time
