Rashaad Newsome’s feature-length documentary Assembly will make its Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival on June 12th and 15th, 2025!

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The 72nd Sydney Film Festival has unveiled its full 2025 lineup, featuring 201 films from 70 countries—including the Australian premiere of Assembly, directed and produced by Rashaad Newsome and Johnny Symons.

At the heart of Assembly is Newsome’s most ambitious exhibition to date, originally staged at New York’s iconic Park Avenue Armory. The film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the monumental creative journey—from choreographing with international dancers who merge voguing with traditional movement, to a spiritual pilgrimage to Ghana to commune with ancestors. The result is an immersive Black queer utopia that brings together poets, musicians, dancers, and the exhibition’s striking centerpiece: a 30-foot-tall non-binary AI named Being.

Merging documentary, performance, art, and activism, Assembly defies easy categorization. It is a joyful, defiant tribute to Black trans women and to voguing as a global art form—an electrifying vision of liberation, collaboration, and radical imagination.

For more info, click here!

Rashaad Newsome, Chimera, January 16 – February 28, 2025, University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities Gallery

The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities Gallery proudly presents Rashaad Newsome: Chimera, an immersive exhibition running from January 16 to February 28, 2025. At the heart of the exhibition is a newly commissioned film, also titled Chimera, which bridges the narratives of Newsome’s previous works, Hands Performance and Build or Destroy, through an interquel that delves into the origins and purpose of the searing, flame-engulfed figure who emerges from the spaceship where Hands Performance unfolds. This bold shift toward sci-fi filmmaking layers filmic architecture, movement, and world-building to explore identity, resistance, and creation.

Hands Performance fuses Black Queer ASL and vogue fem traditions, translating Newsome’s poetry into a celestial choreography of signing and dancing aboard a spaceship, while Build or Destroy follows a blazing figure igniting fires of transformation through voguing in a fictional cityscape. These films, alongside two new collage works and custom vinyl installations, immerse visitors in a speculative universe of liberation and renewal. Chimera offers a cinematic experience that redefines the structures of sci-fi filmmaking and positions art as a vehicle for boundless resistance and creation. Join us for this extraordinary exploration of speculative Black art and the mythic journeys it charts.

For more info on the exhibition and related events, click here!

Rashaad Newsome In the Absence of Evidence, We Create Stories at 17 February – 4 August 2024

In an exploration of the relationship between gender expression and identity, with a focus on pre-colonial traditions, the Sainsbury Centre will present works by a myriad of internationally acclaimed artists, including new work, UK premieres, and new acquisitions.
New Orleans-born Rashaad Newsome (b.1979), whose multi-disciplinary work explores black and queer space in art history, will present a new collection of multimedia collages shown in conversation with objects from the Sainsbury Centre’s African Art collection.
In late Spring, a newly commissioned holographic work titled In the Absence of Evidence, We Create Stories (2024) will be added to the exhibition. The piece looks both at the cultural traditions of the past and the possibility of the future. Images of Newsome’s collages synthesized with African sculptures and objects from the Sainsbury Centre’s collection will be transformed into futuristic cyborgs that poeticly speak about their past, present, and future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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