Amelia Umuhire’s exhibition, FKBP5, transposes the contemporary influences of internet culture and transnational domesticity onto recent-historical narratives of collective precarity and political violence. Her show incorporates three time-based works—a commercially commissioned video, a short film and a radio feature. In these, the filmmaker explores relationships between personal narratives, national politics and contemporary culture in a pan-African context.

One 2018 video, originally commissioned for use as a performance backdrop on the twentieth-anniversary tour of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, is set in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Umuhire’s video incorporates street scenes filmed by Mugabo Baritegera, animations by Frederic Marshall, and archival footage referencing turning points in the political history of independent Congo. At Decad, a new edit of the video is exhibited in combination with a 2019 audio piece.

Alongside these, Umuhire’s short film Mugabo is presented in the frame of an installation. Mugabo was shot in 2016 in Kigali and follows an Afro-European protagonist visiting Rwanda for the first time after the 1994 Tutsi genocide.

The exhibition’s third component, a radio feature entitled Vaterland, was produced for the German station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. This 2018 longform audio work also relates to Umuhire’s ongoing research into personal histories of the Rwandan genocide.

Amelia Umuhire is a Rwandan-German filmmaker based in Berlin. Born in Kigali in 1991, Umuhire had her directorial debut in 2015 with the web series Polyglot, currently available for viewing on youtube. She has since won numerous awards, including Best German Web Series, for that work and has gone on to produce several short films. Her work has to date been shown at MOCA Los Angeles, MCA Chicago, Tribeca Film Festival, Smithsonian African American Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and many more. A recent English-language interview with Umuhire about her work can be found on MCA Chicago’s website here.

The exhibition FKBP5 has been installed in collaboration with the Berlin-based architect and set designer Johannes Maas.

Details regarding the show’s accompanying public programme will be available shortly.

decad.org