Lonnie Holley, All Rendered Truth, installation view, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK, 2024 © Lonnie Holley. Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti. Photo by Rob Harris
Having premiered as an official selection at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, I Snuck Off The Slave Ship is the directorial debut of the artist and musician Lonnie Holley. Set to an improvised, visceral score performed by Holley, the film is shot in the artist’s home state of Georgia, constructed from real and reenacted vignettes of his life.
Using technology of his own design, Holley transgresses reality with his imagination, liberating past versions of himself from irreversible events and societal paradigms. Temporal talismans guide him through the fragmented phenomena of the Black American experience. His freedom quest seems perpetually trapped at a point of discontinuum: July 4, the birth date of the self-replicating slave ship America.
Mirroring the atmosphere of spiritual transcendence, the film is exhibited within a sculptural environment comprising hand-carved salvaged church pews and suspended wire sculptures.
Active since 1979, Lonnie Holley's (born 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama) practice encompasses sculpture, painting, filmmaking, and music. Holley’s groundbreaking art-making techniques, employed to address themes including social justice, technology, and ancestral memory, have made him one of the most influential American living artists. His work is represented in institutional collections around the world, including the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (France), Metropolitan Museum of Art (US), National Gallery of Art (US), Smithsonian American Art Museum (US) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (US). Holley lives and works in Atlanta.
