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

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (1987). 10+ films since 2013; screenings at venues including Tate Modern, Berlinale, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Venice Biennale (2022), Bienal de São Paulo (2023), and BlackStar Film Festival. Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” (2020), Princess Grace Award (2014), Creative Capital Award (2022), Herb Alpert Award (2023). Lives in New York, New York.

Simone Leigh (1967). Works in sculpture, video, and installation; exhibitions and screenings at venues including MoMA PS1, Kunsthalle Wien, Media City Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Whitney Biennial (2019). Hugo Boss Prize (2018). First Black woman to represent the USA at the Venice Biennale (2022), where she was awarded a Golden Lion. Lives in New York, New York.