Gasworks presents a major new film commission by filmmaker and artist Ufuoma Essi. Informed by Black feminist epistemology, her films and moving image works examine history as an embodied experience. Essi makes great use of archival footage intercut with heterogeneous materials, including homemade VHS tapes, YouTube clips, and analog 16mm footage shot on location. Her work aims to disrupt the silences and gaps in the dominant visual narratives through an embodied exploration of archives. Is My Living in Vain is a meditation on the continuing history and emancipatory potential of the Black church as a space of diasporic belonging, affirmation, and community organizing. Weaving together archival imagery, oral histories, and shot footage, Essi’s film follows a tangled thread of personal and collective memories to interrogate the church’s contribution to a Black radical tradition. At Gasworks, Essi will celebrate the performativity within informal spaces of the congregation, looking at the political, spiritual, and existential connections between communities in West Philadelphia and South London, two locations intimately bound to the artist’s biography. The film will be presented as part of an immersive installation exploring parallels between the church and the cinema as sites of shared communal experience.

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