Two new films take the act of looking at art as their structuring principle

"Consisting of titles and descriptions of works from antiquity to today that depict the Black female form, Robin Coste Lewis's poem Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015) is, in its rolling invocations of unnamed slave girls and shards of looted statuary, both exhibition catalogue and litany of instrumentalisation. A reading of the poem, in a sanitised and objective voice, serves as the soundtrack to a walk through the Musée du Louvre in the French director Alice Diop's short film Fragments for Venus (2025),"

"As she stares silently at, say, Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana (1562-63), Diop's camera scours the canvas for traces of Blackness-a servant, a background figure-blowing them up to fill the frame, a close-up answered by a reverse-shot of the museumgoer in contemplation. This act of scepticism and retrieval-surely an art-historical response to Saidiya Hartman's boundary-pushing scholarly work imagining the lives of enslaved people-is contrasted by the film's second chapter,"

"A girl dribbles a basketball, a young woman reads, a crossing guard dances; in a coda, Diop races through a montage of work by, for and of Black woman, ending on Nona Faustine's defiant They Tagged the Land with Trophies and Institutions from their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC (2013) and end credits scored to Meshell Ndegeocello's spoken-word "Thus Sayeth the Lorde" (as in Audre)."

Voyage of the Sable Venus compiles titles and descriptions of works from antiquity to the present that depict the Black female form, functioning as both exhibition catalogue and litany of instrumentalisation. Fragments for Venus pairs a sanitised, objective reading of the poem with a walk through the Musée du Louvre, where a Black museumgoer stares at paintings while the camera enlarges background Black figures. That sceptical retrieval is set against a second chapter of moving-image portraits filmed in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, portraying quotidian Black womanhood. The film culminates in a montage of work by and of Black women, ending on Nona Faustine and scored by Meshell Ndegeocello.

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