To Wash Ourselves Clean Of Desire | May 1, 15, + 22
The programming series To Wash Ourselves Clean Of Desire explores the core facets of Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s pivotal practice, while introducing Vancouver audiences to a cohort of Black and African queer artists, thinkers, and cultural producers whose work exists within the same lineage. Like Fani-Kayode, these artists engage with themes of queerness, African and diasporic spiritual practices, and the entanglements of being a body in physical exile.
The series title, To Wash Ourselves Clean Of Desire, is an interpolation of the verse “[i]nstructed … to wash ourselves clean of desire… to be saved from what threatened to convert us into stone” (p.1) from Nigerian poet Romeo Oriogun’s A Sacrament of Bodies. In response to this verse and Fani-Kayode’s seminal Nothing to Lose (Bodies of Experience) series, the films, workshops, and lectures that comprise this program visualise a transformative approach to African queer identity formation—one that emerges from an intermingling embrace of the forbidden, and of African spiritual traditions.
By interrogating desire and what is lost when one rejects it, this series seeks to define Black and African queerness not as a shadow cast by whiteness but on its own terms, with its own aesthetic, spiritual, and political weight and implications. Through the components of this series, we ask: What are the roots of our desire? How do desire, spirituality, religion, and shame shape our embodied selves? And how can vulnerability serve as a pathway to personal and communal healing?
Banner Image: The Wound, video still, courtesy Kino Lorber
Content Advisory: This program includes material that engages with themes of queerness, ritual, sexuality, and the historical and ongoing violence enacted upon Black bodies. Some of the works contain nudity, depictions of desire, and references to death, ancestral trauma, and gendered violence.
Thursday, May 1 at 7:00pm
To Catch the Spirit of the Old Rites
Join us for a double feature screening of Oreoluwa Akinyode’s experimental short film SHINING, IN PLAIN SIGHT, followed by a feature-length screening of John Trengove’s acclaimed 2017 film Inxeba (The Wound).
Image: Oreoluwa Akinyode, SHINING, IN PLAIN SIGHT, video still
Thursday, May 15 at 7:00pm
Embodied Generations: Drawing + Movement Workshop with Odera Igbokwe
Join us for a live figure drawing and movement workshop led by artist Odera Igbokwe, presented as part of the programming series To Wash Ourselves Clean of Desire. Drawing inspiration from Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s early sketch work—on view in Tranquility of Communion—participants will begin with a guided live figure drawing session that invites reflection on the conventional and voyeuristic ways the Black body has been depicted.
Image: Odera Igbokwe, Funeral Rights (detail), 2025
Thursday, May 22 at 7:00pm
If Beauty Is The Mother Of Pathology, What Is Desire?
Utilising the works of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Cuban-born artist René Peña, and the late George Dureau as case studies in Black queer sexuality, representation, and homoerotic mythologies, curator Moroti George delves into the politics of desire and its historical and ongoing implications for the perception and articulation of Black masculinity and the queer embodied self.
Image: René Peña, Untitled, 1996. Courtesy of Lucie Garcia Gallery.