In this episode, our monthly interviews with artists, we talk with the director of a new film on a Libyan dissident and discuss a new exhibition on the global black experience.
In a lecture delivered at the University of Toronto in 2002 called “The Foreigners Home,” the late American writer Toni Morrison offers a reflection on the inside/outside blur that can enshrine frontiers, and borders: real, metaphorical, and psychological, as we wrestle with definitions of nationalism, citizenship, race, ideology and the so-called clash of cultures in our search to belong. African and American writers are not alone in coming to terms with these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting them. Of not being at home in one’s homeland; of being exiled in the place one belongs.
African and American artists have to come to terms with this too. A recent virtual exhibition created by Cedric Brown, Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity and an award-winning social impact leader, called “The Shape of Blackness”, offers a perspective on the black experience by South African and American visual artists—one a black majority nation, and the other a black minority nation. Cedric is joined by South African designer and director of Gallery MOMO Johannesburg, Odysseus Shirindza, who is also one of the exhibition’s curators.
After, we chat with Khalid Shamis, director and editor of “The Colonel’s Stray Dogs”, a film about his dad, Ashur, who lives in London and played a leading role in the exiled resistance against Muammar Gaddafi’s one party, repressive rule. The film is also about family. As Khalid says in the film: “For the forty years he was in exile in England, it felt like killing Gaddafi was more important to him than living with us.” In the end, Gaddafi did fall (we know that because it is history) and Ashur Shamis went back to Libya to help rebuild, but would he be welcome? And did the country move on from him.
We’re pleased to have the opportunity to ask Khalid these and other questions. The Colonel’s Stray Dogs is not the first film he has made about his family; a previous film, Imam and I, dealt with his maternal grandfather, Imam Haron, and his murder by apartheid police in South Africa. As an editor, Khalid's credits include Afrikaaps (2010), Action Kommandant (2016), Scenes from a Dry City (2018) and The Sound of Masks (2018) amongst many others.
