Hope Strickland

15 Feb-9 Apr 2023

Overview

Hope Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and researcher from Manchester, UK. Her current practice is concerned with maroon ecologies and the bonds between resource extraction and racial violence. 'Maroons' are the name given to those who escaped from slavery and their descendants. Their existence outside plantation logics was often, in part, due to their successful navigation of inhospitable environments such as swamps and dense mountains. Hope’s work also explores the temporal fractures and intimacies that can be found in working across 16mm, digital and archival film formats. Hope produced the short film I’ll be back! (2022) after being awarded a FACT Together digital residency in 2021.

I’ll Be Back! begins and ends with the story of the rebel slave Francois Mackandal. In 1758, Mackandal was condemned to be burned at the stake, not only for his crimes but for his radical powers of metamorphosis.

Filmed in archives and museums across the UK, I’ll Be Back! (2022) explores a series of collections holding objects of colonial violence. Amongst these is a book containing a diagram of a slave ship, a key document in the abolitionist movement widely published for its shocking nature, and a collection of insects gathered in Sierra Leone by a colonial topographer mapping borders and defining British and French territory in West Africa.

Shifting across digital, 16mm and archival formats, the film interrogates institutional collecting practices and reconsiders the distances between myth, history and machinations of power.

Hope's work is presented in FACT's gallery space designed by Chila Kumari Singh Burman.