Memory Repeats: Ufuoma Essi and the Liberation of Collective Consciousness

Bodies in Dissent (Ufuoma Essi, 2021).

In May 2001, at Harford’s Connecticut Forum, the journalist Juan Williams poses an audience question to the legendary writer, editor, and critic Toni Morrison: “How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something?” Morrison, with characteristic elegance and wit, demurs to the moderator that she will not be able to answer “quickly.” She chuckles, adjusts her necklace, and repeats the question to herself like a mantra: How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something? “You know,” she begins,

It's a nice big fat philosophical question, about: How do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can—and behaving as beautifully as one can—under completely impossible circumstances.… We are already born; we are going to die. So, you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.

Morrison’s response—set against the flickering flares of Super 8 film leader—opens the British artist and filmmaker Ufuoma Essi’s Half Memory (2024), one of the two films in Projects: Ufuoma Essi at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In this and Bodies in Dissent (2021), the artist posits the moving image as both a symbolic and literal retainer of memory, using voiceover and archival footage to capture the liberation of collective consciousness. 

Nearly all of the artist’s video and installation work—which has been shown at such institutions as the Barbican Centre, the Julia Stoschek Foundation, and Gasworks—concerns the idea of memory: how it is experienced, preserved, and warped on both an individual and collective level. Born and raised in South East London, Essi studied history at University College London and began to experiment with filmmaking during a year abroad at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was exposed to the work of artists such as Arthur Jafa and Chris Marker. Her training in both history and the visual arts is apparent in her films, each one unfolding as a collage of Black feminist thought across the African diaspora. Inspired by the writings of Daphne A. Brooks and others, Essi has said she uses film “to experiment with how we process information and history through images,” as it gives her “the ability to disrupt that and play with the order of things.”¹

Half Memory (Ufuoma Essi, 2024).

Bodies in Dissent takes its title from Brooks’s 2006 book, subtitled Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, which examines how Black entertainers and activists in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America used performance to “[confront] and [transform] slavery’s punitive ‘social death,’ turning that estranged condition into a rhetorical and social device and a means to survival.”² In Essi’s film, the performer Nambi Kiyira traverses a verdant clearing and the surrounding forest. Her unfolding sequence of movement is methodical, but not rigid: Kiyira is as serene as she is strong, appearing to move in collaboration with the branches and low-lying brush, which reflect her angular movements. The soundtrack is a 1964 concert recording of atonal, minimalist music by Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, jazz pioneers whose collaborations had previously included the 1960 album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, as well as the 1961 demonstration at the United Nations after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, often thought of as initiating the Black Power movement. As Kiyira continues, Essi includes brief archival clips from Black Journal of the dancer Loretta Abbott. In the era immediately following Reconstruction, Brooks writes, the stage was “a site of revision and self-making for Black women and their overdetermined bodies in the cultural imaginary.”³Juxtaposing the work of Lincoln, Roach, and Abbott with the movements of Kiyira, Bodies in Dissent connects distinct points in the centuries-long tradition of radical Black art and activism to our own.

In conversation with the writer and curator Tendai Mutambu, Essi states that Morrison’s 1986 lecture “The Site of Memory” was the “methodology” she used to “[think] about memory as a way to revisit the past” through filmmaking.⁴ Morrison’s lecture—delivered as she was writing her magnum opus, Beloved—outlines the uneasy relationship between autobiography and memory, stating that “a very large part of [her] own literary heritage is the autobiography.”⁵ The legacy of Black writers in the United States begins with the abolitionist slave narrative, exemplified by Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Despite the literary and historical importance of these texts, Morrison says, they lack a sense of their narrators’ memory and thoughts, which have been jettisoned in the name of objectivity (as determined by the white audiences to whom these books were tailored), but amounting to self-censorship, in which accounts of abject violence and sexual abuse are often omitted.

In her own work, Morrison considers interiority and memory to be essential:

For me—a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is Black and a woman—the exercise is very different. My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to relate.” … Moving that veil requires, therefore, certain things. First of all, I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others. Thus memory weighs heavily in what I write, in how I begin and what I find to be significant.⁶

Installation view of Projects: Ufuoma Essi on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 22 through October 14, 2025. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado.

Projected to fill the entirety of the gallery’s back wall, Essi’s Half Memory prioritizes interiority—composed from fleeting moments culled from the recesses of her personal archive. This thirty-minute mélange of Super 8 footage—taken across San Francisco, London, and other locations—becomes, to borrow a phrase from Morrison, a type of “literary archeology,” with the artist reinterpreting fragments of memory and thought into a cohesive moving image.⁷ Assembling this was a process based on instinct and emotion, as Essi says she “didn’t necessarily remember how [she] felt at each moment while shooting.” Overlaid voices—Morrison, literary scholar Devonya N. Havis, archivist Chaitra Powell, and writer Amanda Bennett—encapsulates Essi’s interpretation of this uncovered footage.⁸ They speak of linguistics, the importance of storytelling, and the role that memory plays in preserving archives of Black experience and thought as scenes of quickly gentrifying neighborhoods—themselves archives of memory—float by on the screen. 

The importance of retaining an archive of memory and history is exemplified by a series of shots of a sparsely populated California beach, taken far enough away for the people in the frame to be reduced to fuzzy silhouettes. The sun is setting as Essi’s camera pans across the shoreline, and the voice of poet and activist June Jordan emerges, speaking against the United States’ involvement in the Gulf War at a 1991 rally in Hayward, California. 

Jordan and Morrison first became acquaintances through Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House in the 1970s and early ’80s, where she championed Black writers such as Henry Dumas, Angela Davis, and Toni Cade Bambara. When Jordan submitted her poetry to Random House in 1975, Morrison personally wrote the publishers’ rejection letter, reportedly saying: 

The answer they gave was ‘we would prefer her prose—will do poetry if we must.’ Now I would tell them to shove it if that were me—and place my poetry where it was received with glee. But I am not you. Nor am I a poet.⁹

Morrison and Jordan later reconnected through “The Sisterhood,” a group of Black women writers in New York that met from 1977 to 1979. Among their ranks were such luminaries as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Ntozake Shange. Their meetings included critique of each other’s writing and discussion of current events and misogynoir in other literary circles. Perhaps most importantly, the group provided space and time away from the pressures of the outside world.¹⁰ Morrison and Jordan’s relationship as friends, collaborators, and coconspirators continued until Jordan’s death in 2002. 

The inclusion of Jordan’s unidentified voice in Half Memory feels natural, as if the viewer is transported to a meeting of The Sisterhood. Her impassioned argument against a “killer crusade” that “has not saved one human being from terror or from unspeakable agonies of extinction” is decontextualized, positioning the conflict not as a unique, unprecedented horror but as a repeating aspect of colonization, racism, and capitalism. Here is the cyclical nature of violence, time, and memory that haunts Half Memory, Beloved, and other artworks informed by Black feminist thought. In Jordan’s speech, the “killing fields” of the Gulf War could just as easily be those of the US war in Vietnam two decades prior. The “assault upon all peaceable possibilities” is the United States’ prolonged entrenchment in Iraq ten years hence. And the “annihilation of all tenderness” is Israel’s genocide in Gaza today. 

Half Memory (Ufuoma Essi, 2024).

Essi heightens this sense of repetition elsewhere in the film, creating brief sequences of looped footage she refers to as “glitches”:

You see an image once, then again, and again, to the point where you think, “It should move on,” but it doesn’t. For me, memory functions in that way, too.… Where you’re stuck in that memory, and you’re reliving it, sometimes because you want to and sometimes because you can’t move on from the memory.… I love long shots in my work, but here, I don’t stay on any single image too long. Instead, repetition carries that feeling—you see something again, but not quite the same way.¹¹

Fittingly, Essi’s Half Memory ends as it starts. Beginning in a subway station, Essi repeats fragments of footage taken from inside the train car, illuminated by the blinding lights of the platform. As the train departs the tunnel, the screen is submerged in the ink black of the sky, and the train lights merge with those of the city—headlights, streetlamps, and the occasional light emanating from a building. These, too, fade into nothing, and the kaleidoscopic light leaks on the film leader take over. A warped, unnamed voice interrupts the film’s atonal yet rhythmic hum: 

So, it’s not as if I can be simply in the past, which is often a function of memory, and so when we talk about remembering or memorializing, often our imaginative frame is narrowed down in ways that don’t encompass that unique cultural approach.

The film leader continues until Half Memory’s end—though in the looped projection of the exhibition, it is not entirely clear where the film ends and begins again. The phosphenes flashing against the screen are the same as those at the film’s start, only changing once Morrison’s Hartford speech starts again with that vexing question: How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something? With Half Memory and Bodies in Dissent, Essi suggests that the answer is memory: a shared archive of history, pain, and knowledge shared between us as sound and image, on an infinite loop.

1.      Ruby Boddington, “Ufuoma Essi Is an Artist Working with Found Footage to Explore Black Feminist Epistemology,” It’s Nice That, September 11, 2020.  ↩
2.      Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Duke University Press, 2006), 2–3. ↩
3.      Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 286.  ↩
4.      Ufuoma Essi, Tendai Mutambu, and Gee Wesley, “Memory Figures: Ufuoma Essi and Tendai Mutambu in Conversation,” MoMA Magazine July 16, 2025.  ↩
5.      Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2nd ed., ed. William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 85. ↩
6.      Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” 91-92.  ↩
7.      Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” 92 ↩
8.      Essi, Mutambu, and Wesley, “Memory Figures.” ↩
9.      Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Difficult. Miracle. Toni Morrison and the Possibility of Poetry,” Brilliance Remastered, August 8, 2019. ↩
10.      Kaitlyn Greenidge, “The Power of Sisterhood,” Harper’s Bazaar, February 28, 2023.  ↩
11.      Essi, Mutambu, and Wesley, “Memory Figures.” ↩