Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby: south florida sky
Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby, south florida sky, 2022
HD video, colour, sound, 7 min 24 sec. Courtesy the artists and Xxijra Hii, London
About the Work
south florida sky (2022) imagines the comic hero Swamp Thing, present in physical form, rendered fluid and enmeshed within the biologically diverse space of the swamp. It reanimates and pays homage to the hand-drawn context while providing a queered unravelling of the character. This process of disidentification portrays both the swamp and the body as sites of radical interconnectivity. The work generates a network – a swamp of queered collectivity beyond the two artists.
Drawing from natural systems of interconnectedness – mycelium networks, siphonophores, the primordial ooze – the project rejects individualized modes of production and favours a polyphonic approach. Partially generated by GAN, a machine-learning framework fed images of Swamp Thing, wetlands, fungus and slime, semi-recognizable forms congeal and re-submerge in a digital mire, morphing into new configurations. Captured using 16mm film yet digitally produced, the work embodies José Esteban Muñoz’s call for utopian performativity: ‘a conjuring of both future and past to critique presentness’.
About the Artist
Unpacking the intersection of their individual concerns, Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby’s collaborative practice constructs a language based on mediation itself. With a mutual interest in the subcultural languages of leather, fetish and body modification, their work explores the skin as a site of exchange, collaboration and desire, positioning exposure as an exercise in collectivity.
About ICA x FRIEZE FILM LONDON
Frieze Film returns to Frieze London in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The curated selection of seven films will be screened throughout Frieze Week, 8–13 October, at the ICA and on frieze.com, streaming online until 31 October.
The programme showcases films from galleries with a focus on early-career and under-exposed artists. This year’s films were selected by a jury including Steven Cairns (Head of Artistic Programme at the ICA), Myriam Mouflih (Curator, Writer and Programmer at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival) and Guilherme Blanc (Artistic Director of Batalha Centro de Cinema and curator of independent cinema and moving image) for the second year.
