The Sound Crickets Make

Parsons School of Design MFA Photography 2023

Bella Okuya

Present Tense, Future Perfect

Bella Okuya is a British visual artist working across film, photography, and installation. Her work is about navigating the collective experiences of people of color in relation to placemaking, wellbeing, and class, using the frame of the elemental nature of human existence through meditative imagery, sound, and silence. Bella is the founder of the London-based collective Red Rolled and Seen, with whom she has created two photobook publications.

Present Tense, Future Perfect is a sensorial experimental moving image installation about the external violent erosion of working class communities through the gentrification of landscapes. In turn, this produces an internal violence within the original people who inhabited those spaces, impacting their wellbeing and producing a fragmented and wounded community. The photographs accompanying this statement are moving image stills from the video. An experimental photobook featuring traces of the landscape and community will also be shared during the exhibition.


Contact:

bellaokuya@gmail.com

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