Jan 4th 2017

Testify (for the Harlem Six): week 3

@ Stony Island Arts Bank

6760 S Stony Island Ave, Chicago, IL 60649

On view through Wednesday, December 31st

Video installation in conjunction with Glenn Ligon’s A Small Band exhibition at the Stony Island Arts Bank through January 30. Videos play daily, beginning on the hour from 12-7pm.

Here we screen works that reflect on the capacity of Black people to speak truth to power, to address systematic abuses to and through their bodies, and the bodies of others. In 1964, Harlem teenager Daniel Hamm bravely made his body speak — not only when he opened a fresh bruise while in police custody in order to show his need for medical treatment, but also when he recounted the gory tale, exposing to the world the atrociousness of police brutality, and its denial. Talking, dancing, singing, remixing, dreaming— the films in this series show how such acts attest to the repetitive, cyclical nature of Black pain and suffering, particularly at the hands of the State. Yet, like the alternately blinking neon words in Glenn Ligon’s A Small Band on view downstairs, these films also call attention to the power of reflection as resistance.

THIS WEEK |
The Torture of Mothers (Woodie King, Jr., 1980, 52m)
Mothers of the “Harlem Six,” a group of young black men wrongly accused and convicted of murder in the mid-1960s, bond together to defend their sons, and to unite a community in the name of justice. This docu-drama re-enacts the mothers’ struggle to protect their sons and make their story known.

Four Women (Julie Dash, 1979, 8m)
Set to Nina Simone’s stirring ballad of the same name, Julie Dash’s dance film features Linda Martina Young as strong “Aunt Sarah,” tragic mulatto “Saffronia,” sensuous “Sweet Thing” and militant “Peaches,” shattering pervasive stereotypes with each autobiographical verse.

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