Looking Back (Being and Memory)

A season of artist films

Arnolfini presents Looking Back (Being and Memory) a season of artist films selected in response to themes explored in our major exhibition Barbara Walker: Being Here, (screened in our dark studio throughout Spring on our second floor).

The season begins with the first exhibition screening of artist Hope Strickland’s gentle meander a river holds a perfect memory spanning geographical locations as disparate as the Martha Brae River and bio-luminescent Falmouth Lagoon in Jamaica and the industrial waterways of northern England, alongside I’ll be Back (2022), the story ofthe rebel Haitian maroon Francois Mackandel filmed in archives and museums across the UK.

Looking back at Bristol’s own history, Bristol-born Julz Davis (founder of award-winning think and do tank Curiosity UnLtd) presents a series of films focusing upon the impact of the events of the Bristol Bus Boycott in 1963, exploring Paul Stephenson’s one-man sit-in of the Bay Horse Pub in 1964, and the 1965 Race Relations Act.

Our season concludes with London-based artist and writer Morgan Quaintance’s reflection on the passages of time in Efforts of Nature (2024), combining the poetry of Vietnam war veteran Yusef Komunyakaa, anatomical images of the body and the disintegration of polar ice caps.

Weaving together source material from archives, public collections and official records – a practice which also lies at the heart of Walker’s work – Looking Back (Being and Memory) brings to life communal histories exploring institutional and colonial violence and our relationship with the natural world, asking us to question what it means it belong.

main image: Hope Strickland, a river holds a perfect memory (2025). Film still. Courtesy of the artist.