Steffani Jemison: Sensus Plenior (2017)

The screening in English language and a short introduction by curator Jen Kratochvil takes place on Thursday, 18 October at 8pm. Admission is free, reservation online HERE.

Sensus Plenior (2017) Taking its title from Latin for “fuller meaning, a new film by the US artist Steffani Jemison considers the relationship between language, gesture and music in African-American gospel mime through work and thoughts of Reverend Susan Webb and the Master Mime Ministry of Harlem. Through their elaborate and ecstatic choreography, gospel mime performers draw on dual genealogies that can be traced both, to the revolutionary mime artist Marcel Marceau and West African dance traditions. In her videos, Jemison complicates the boundaries of performance and cinema, allowing the audience to become suspended outside structures of linear time and controlled meaning.

Steffani Jemison (*1981, Berkeley, California, lives and works in New Yorku, MFA 2009) uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine “progress” and its alternatives. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Jemison holds an MFA from SAIC and a BA in comparative literature from Columbia University. Jemison’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; LAXART, Los Angeles; the New Museum, New York; Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark; among others. Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Kadist Foundation, Paris and San Francisco. Jemison was the 2017–18 Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Find more information about the new series of presentations Rudolfinum_Time-Based here.