Still from Neneh Cherry, Kong

Award-winning and visionary artist and director Jenn Nkiru has steadily been creating a name for herself with her distinctive visual style and powerful use of sound in her short films for the BFI, Frieze, Gucci, Condé Nast, Channel 4 and Tate. The relationship between image, sound and music, as well as movement and tone, are central concerns of her work.

Pushed through an Afro-Surrealist lens, her works are grounded in the history of Black music and the aesthetics of experimental film. She also fuses international art cinema, the Black arts movement and the rich and variegated tradition of cinemas of the Black diaspora. Nkiru is best known in popular culture for her work as the Second Unit Director of visuals for The Carters’ Apeshit video, directed by Ricky Saiz. She has also directed music videos for Neneh Cherry and Kamasi Washington. She is a Somerset House Studios resident artist.

The visuals created for Kamasi Washington’s Hub Tones invoke ideas of Amiri Baraka’s Nation Time and the immediate ecstatic connection Nkiru had to its rhythms. Its main inspiration comes from a traditional ceremony called Oboni from the Ikwerre - Nkiru’s tribe by heritage. Through repetition of movement and instrumentation, those in our material realm go through a process of channelling divine ancestral connection into the spiritual realm.

Nkiru’s second work featured in Get Up, Stand Up Now - Kong - was created for Neneh Cherry and is a song of protest born during Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis. It is also a reminder of the farreaching consequences of colonialism. Nkiru’s visuals are an ode to the varied identities of multicultural London and the feelings and energies of times past.