“Afronauts, Palestinauts, Indigenauts” highlights the anti-colonial imaginings of space travel in Black, Palestinian, and Indigenous cinema. The program includes Nuotama Bodomo's Afronauts (2014), Larissa Sansour's A Space Exodus (2008), and Walter Scott's Xinona (2018) and Wendy's Revenge (2016). These works are provocative speculative fictions about the possibilities of otherworldly futures angled against racism, patriarchy, and colonialism.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register in advance.

You will receive links to watch all the films the week of the event. On Friday, January 22 you will receive a Zoom link to attend a live performance of Wendy's Revenge as well as a panel discussion with Bodomo, Sansour, and Scott. Audience Q&A to follow.

This event is made possible by a Mellon Winter Colloquium grant from the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

Nuotama Bodomo is a Ghanaian writer and director. She grew up in Ghana, Norway, California, and Hong Kong before moving to New York to study film at Columbia University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her short films Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) both premiered at Sundance Film Festival and went on to screen at festivals including the Berlinale, Telluride, SXSW, and New Directors/New Films. Afronauts received five Grand Jury Prizes and played at the Whitney Museum in the fall as part of “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016.” Bodomo most recently directed the short segment Everybody Dies! for the omnibus feature Collective:Unconscious (2016), which premiered at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival. It won Best Experimental Short at the 2016 BlackStar Film Festival.

Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian artist/director. Central to her work is the tug and pull between fiction and reality. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos, and sculptures. Sansour’s work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, she represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. She has shown her work at Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and the Istanbul Biennial as well as the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and BFI London Film Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include Bluecoat in Liverpool, Dar El-Nimer in Beirut and Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen. Sansour lives and works in London.

Walter Scott b. 1985, is an interdisciplinary artist working across comics, drawing, video, performance and sculpture. His comic series, Wendy, chronicles the continuing misadventures of a young artist in a satirical version of the contemporary art world. Wendy has been featured in Canadian Art, Art in America, and published online on the New Yorker. Recent exhibitions include The Scrawled Heel of the Real, Ashley (Berlin), and The Pathos Of Mandy, at the ISCP, New York. Walter was recently an artist-in-residence, at the ISCP, in Brooklyn, New York. His new graphic novel, Wendy, Master of Art, is now available from Drawn & Quarterly.