This year’s Jarman Award has been received by Grace Ndiritu, an artist and filmmaker whose practice spans moving image, performance art, publishing and fashion. The London-based award, founded in 2008, each year seeks to platform some of the most groundbreaking filmmaking, with a £10,000 prize for the winner. Working at the intersection of the spiritual and the political, Grace won over the judges with her meditative and sometimes uncanny explorations of how humanity can transform and heal itself amongst the furore of contemporary society, as well as her dealing with issues of environmental justice and indigenous land rights. This year’s panel featured Iwona Blazwick OBE, Matthew Barrington, Barbican, Channel 4, Nicole Yip and last year’s winner Jasmina Cibic, among others.
From Grace’s recent oeuvre through to the two-screen film Black Beauty: For a Shamanic Cinema (2022), she fabricates a meeting between a Black model and talk show host in conversation with the writer Jorge Luis Borges, debating climate change, pandemics, migration, colonialism and time travel. The film is an interesting foray into fabrication and “truth”, with the press release explaining that audiences have mistaken the fictional work as archival footage. In Becoming Plant (2022), six dancers live together on a demilitarised industrial site, using psychedelics to induce a therapeutic group experiment, a film which “serves as a catalyst to discuss wider social and relational issues such as science, spirituality, psychiatry, healing, healthcare and the problems of collective depression and trauma resulting from life in the age of Late Capitalism”.
