AN ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE SEGUES TO INFINITY: THE FILMS OF JA’TOVIA GARY & LIVE PERFORMANCE BY LARAAJI

Media City Film Festival kicks off its Opening Night in Detroit with an incredible FREE evening of film and music showcasing a retrospective look at the work of Ja’Tovia Gary, one of the United States’ most significant contemporary moving image artists. The night’s program also includes a rare performance by the Harlem-based multi-instrumentalist, mystic, and laughter meditation guru, Laraaji. Both artists will be in attendance at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Film Theatre.

With The Giverny Suite currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art through 2024, this retrospective of Ja’Tovia Gary’s films represents the Detroit premiere of her most recent film Quiet as It’s Kept (2023), a cinematic response to Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. Ja’Tovia Gary’s work across documentary, video art, sculpture, and installation challenges notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity. Applying what bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both a maker and critical spectator of moving images, her work aims to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. 

An Ecstatic Experience, 6 min, 2015
The Giverny Document, 41 min, 2019
Quiet as It’s Kept, 26 min, 2023

To enjoy Laraaji’s work is to remember that the process of healing is infinite. In the context of the coronavirus and the current wave of resistance against white supremacy, his music is a reminder that the work of imagining a different world exceeds a lifetime. As the writer and activist Audre Lorde has noted, this work is part of a continuum, one that does not begin with one person’s birth or death. Laraaji offers us a nourishing call, one that asks us to briefly pause—to consider the restorative qualities of the sun, the gift of quiet contemplation, and the relief of a good, unexpected laugh—as we continue to fight.—Isabelia Herrera