CCA Introducing: Kialy Tihngang

We're excited to present the fifth artist of this year's CCA Introducing series, Kialy Tihngang, who will be taking over CCA's Instagram on Thursday 30 November 2023. Kialy was nominated for the takeover by CCA's Digital Programmes Coordinator, Cecelia Graham. Alongside the takeover, Kialy is presenting the video 'For Those In Peril On The Sea' on site at CCA Derry~Londonderry. 

Kialy is a multidisciplinary Glasgow-based visual artist working in sculpture, video, textiles, animation and photomontage, often in collaboration with performers and musicians, involving elaborate handmade sets, costumes and props. As a British-born Cameroonian, Kialy's research-based practice focuses on colonial European misrepresentation, extraction, and demonisation of West African cultural practices, but also on her own misremembering, misreading, and romanticisation of said practices, primarily by designing artefacts from reimagined histories and speculated futures.

The works combine the dark humour of Nollywood with retrofuturism, satire and the visual language of advertisements aimed at mass Western audiences. Kialy uses these tools to explore Blackness, queerness, Britishness, and the crushing structural oppressions that surround these personal themes in absurd ways.

For Those In Peril On The Sea, 2023

For Those In Peril On The Sea speculates that a group of enslaved African people have jumped overboard a slave ship, encountered European maritime technology, and combined it with traditional African religious knowledge to magically return home underwater. The film uses the visual language of modern Christian chain messages and memes to navigate my own fraught relationship with Christianity as a colonial import, and to think about the gradual demonisation of traditional African religions and fetishes by Euro-Christian colonial forces. Pixelation and illegibility are used to synthesise the visual degradation of a widely shared meme, echoing the degradation of the Christian message amidst slavery and colonialism.

For Those in Peril On The Sea will be viewable at CCA Derry~Londonderry tomorrow to coincide with the takeover.

Single channel video
8 minutes 36 seconds
Direction, editing, set design, graphic design, and styling by Kialy Tihngang
Starring Jess Paris
Music by Not Sarah