The Magic Roundabout and The Naked Man

Visit the full exhibition at www.themagicroundaboutandthenakedman.com

This online exhibition included two new video works by Andrew Black and Aman Sandhu. Each work followed a journey around a specific location to consider storytelling, intergenerational exchange, and colonial power relations ‘at home’. Both films were made from a distance, in conversation and collaboration with people who live locally.

Sandhu’s The Magic Roundabout uses a notorious traffic intersection in Swindon as a stage for a series of stories about alternative forms of labour within a local Punjabi family. Shot entirely from a car driven continuously inside the roundabout, the film creates a state of suspension and disorientation while critiquing normative colonial framings of South Asian migrants and the tension between the margin and the centre in practices of resistance.

In The Naked Man in April, Black’s dad Peter uses his phone to record a walk through public and private land adjoining a controversial radar base in Yorkshire, in search of a prehistoric rock carving. This corrupted digital footage is intercut with amateur poetry found in the diaries of a local stonemason at the end of the Victorian era; these depict bucolic spring-time scenes, but also equivocally reflect on social unrest and shifting imperial power.

Black’s film was accompanied by photocopier collages incorporating stock aerial photography and stone rubbings made by Janet and Peter Black. Sandhu  presented new drawings, including studies of Indian farmers installing submersible water pumps at protest sites from the past year.

Supported by Glasgow International