CONSPIRACY
Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, USA, S8 & 16mm > digital, 25 min, 2022 An incantation of multiple architectures of the self for Black women … This tribute to the manual labours of creation, which closes with a gesture of Black feminist arson, forms a contact zone between the respective practices of sculpture and filmmaking. The wandering hypnosis of Hunt-Ehrlich’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography ritualizes the assertive elegance of Leigh’s craftsmanship of clay and stone … This shared composition is directed by a mesmerizing attentiveness to the haptics of sculptural labour … Leigh and Hunt-Ehrlich’s film performs an enchanting re-citation of Hands of Inge (1962), a documentary about the artist Ruth Inge Hardison. An actor and photographer, Hardison was most dedicated to her practice as a sculptor … Leigh and Hunt-Ehrlich have had a decade-long creative friendship, which makes this film an extension of an ongoing conversation that both also share with a larger constellation of Black women cultural workers.—Yasmina Price
