October Gallery presents Imruh Bakari (Writer and Film Maker) and Dr Ian Dudley (Visiting Fellow in Art History at the University of Essex) together in conversation, in celebration of its latest Aubrey Williams exhibition, Future Conscious.
The conversation will focus on Imruh Bakari’s long friendship with Aubrey Williams, including time spent on location, in the UK and Guyana, gathering footage for what became his influential documentary film, The Mark of the Hand - Aubrey Williams (1987). This remarkable film followed Williams’ journey to his birthplace of Georgetown, Guyana. The film traces the course of Williams’ surprisingly emotional return to Hosororo, in Guyana’s Northwest interior region, to visit the indigenous Warrau people who originally inspired him to pursue his lifelong path as an artist. Ian Dudley has written and published scholarly papers on the art of Aubrey Williams, paying particular attention to the Indigenous cultures of Central America and Guyana. Dudley’s insightful publications have generated fresh insight into some of the varied petroglyphic elements seen within Williams' paintings.
This wider discussion will address Williams’ understanding of pre-Columbian histories and cultures, and his prescient foreboding of alienation from the natural world in contrast to Indigenous knowledge systems and their reversible impact on the delicate ecosystemic balance upon which planetary sustainability depends.
