Week 4:

The Ground that Moves Us: In Conversation with Rhea Storr 

In week four Rhea Storr will join the class for a conversation with course convenor Nydia A. Swaby. Together, they will discuss Storr’s creative practice and how research and writing about the production and circulation of images of Black subjects informs her experiments with photography and filmmaking. We will also examine the themes present in her Art on the Underground Commission, Uncommon Observations: The Ground that Moves Us (2022)

About Rhea Storr

Rhea Storr is an artist/filmmaker who explores the representation of Black cultures and her British-Bahamian heritage. She has a continued engagement with the politics of carnival, often focusing on the performance of women from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Masquerade as a site of protest is an ongoing theme in her work. She is interested in spaces where Black cultures are performed, particularly in rural or contested areas. Rhea Storr often works with photochemical film, and her research revolves around Black British Aesthetics and analogue filmmaking practices. She is heavily involved in not nowhere, an artists’ film co-operative focusing on analogue film. She is the winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2020 and the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize.

Learning Materials 

As you review this material, please consider the following questions:

How can an image share knowledge?

How might it be a call to come together as a community?

How can an image challenge or confront its audience? Can it be a projection of joy and liberation? 

Read & Look: Exhibition Text for Uncommon Observations: The Ground that Moves Us (2022)

Watch: A Short Film about the Making of Uncommon Observations: The Ground that Moves Us (2022)