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The Giverny Suite film screening and discussion with the author

Do you feel safe? The central question for the documentary poem The Giverny Suite was posed by its author Ja'Tovia Gary to many African American women on a New York City street. The audiovisual result of this questioning, which was recently exhibited at MoMA in New York, will be presented by the artist to students and interested members of the public at FHS in December.


This workshop has been supported by Charles University Research Centre program No. UNCE/24/SSH/026.


The Giverny Suite film still


Film annotation

The Giverny Suite was filmed in Harlem, New York, and in Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny, France. The Giverny Suite is a cinematic poem that advocates for the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Employing techniques including hand-painted film animation and montage editing, Gary first developed the work during an artist residency in Giverny, where the gardens offered a space of respite.


Centrally featured are person-on-the-street interviews in which the artist approaches women at the intersection of Lenox Avenue (also known as Malcolm X Boulevard) and West 116th Street and asks, “Do you feel safe?” These interviews are interspersed with footage of singer Nina Simone, performer Josephine Baker, political activist Fred Hampton, and Diamond Reynolds recounting the killing of her boyfriend Philando Castile by police in 2016. The installation also includes antique furniture as well as altars dedicated to the Yoruba deities Yemaya and Oshun. “Healing is at the root of the work,” Gary explains. “Making art is a transformative process that transmutes pain or trauma into something beautiful, useful, functional, instructive.”


About the author

Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her multivalent work.

Previous films have received awards at Ann Arbor Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and Locarno Film Festival, among others. Select exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Hammer Museum, and Centre Pompidou. Gary has received generous support from the Trellis Art Fund ,Ford Foundation, Cinereach, Sundance Documentary Institute, Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.


Ja’Tovia Gary

Event start 16 December 2024 at 16:00
Event end 16 December 2024 at 18:00
Type of event Course, workshop, seminar
Organiser Denisa Tomková
Organiser's contact email denisa.tomkova@fhs.cuni.cz
Venue FHS CU (Pátkova 2137/5, 182 00 Praha 8 - Libeň), auditorium
Target group Academic community and public
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Charles University

Faculty of Humanities

Pátkova 2137/5

182 00 Praha 8 - Libeň

Czech Republic


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