4 November 2023 – 29 February 2024
Nuku Studio in collaboration with Red Clay
Nuku Studio presents Routes of Rebellion, an exhibition of film and aural-visual media by Jesse Weaver Shipley. Eleven films explore the journeys that artists, musicians, athletes, and soldiers take in reinventing their worlds and charting routes of rebellion. Revolutions begin not only in the political realm, but in how we challenge naturalized ways of looking and listening.
The exhibition is organized around three themes-in-tension: Music as movement. Sports as imagining. Performance as survival. The fiction and non-fiction films focus on creative characters as they remake old pathways and record new ones. Featured works were produced in Shipley’s 20 years of research and filmmaking practice, forging long-term collaborations between Ghana, New York, and London. Shipley’s art focuses on movement as a technique of storytelling, returning repeatedly to Ghana as a global touchstone of freedom and revolutionary possibility.
The show is produced in Tamale, a cultural capital long at the center of transnational history, circulation, and return. Tethered between Nuku and Red Clay, the project links the films’ subjects to emerging creative communities. The exhibition experiments with archiving as both material product and social process.