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Victoria Adukwei Bulley
VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and has held artistic residencies internationally in the US, Brazil and at the V&A Museum in London. A Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, her pamphlet Girl B (Akashic) forms part of the 2017 New-Generation African Poets series. She is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the recipient of a Technē studentship for doctoral research in Creative Writing.

Articles Available Online


On Water

Essay

Issue No. 29

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Essay

Issue No. 29

& we say to her what have you done with our kin that you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk...

Interview

Issue No. 26

Interview with Saidiya Hartman

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Interview

Issue No. 26

The first time I encountered Saidiya Hartman, she was a voice in salt., an award-winning play by artist and...

‘I remember touch Pictures came with touch’ -Daft Punk, ‘Touch’   In the 1990s, three important pre post-reality films about identity, imitation, and grief came out: Steven Soderberg’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989-1990), Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue (1993) I saw the American indie film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape and the French-Polish art house Blue as a teenager I saw the Iranian docu-fiction, Close-Up, in 2012 All three films are definitively 90s movies to me All three films examine the line between reality and fiction, the enactment of roles, and the place and performance of identity Yet they are also concerned with veracity during a decade that had one last grasp on reality   In Close-Up, Hossain Sazbain, film-lover and devoted fan of the celebrated post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbāf, assumes the identity of the director When Sazbain’s ‘scam’ is discovered, he is put on trial for identity fraudulence A true story, Close-Up consists not simply of reenactment or accurate portrayal, but the representation and staging of truth in/as cinema In the film, the fourth wall is cracked open, so that reality and fiction, on-screen and off-screen, are spun from all directions, creating a seamless, interconnected effect that forecasts the digital age, where screens and performances run on continuous loop and no one is really anyone off-camera     For Sazbain everything is in a name Appellation alone produces identity and political freedom Like the beloved American idiot (an early incarnation of Forrest Gump) ‘Chance the Gardener’, who is mistaken for the upper class ‘Chauncey Gardiner’ in Hal Ashby’s American satire Being There, being does not require actually (real) being Sazbain’s being resides in the appropriation of a name that certifies cultural esteem and artistic invention Assuming someone else’s identity provides him with a role in life and an escape from a repressive political system However, Sazbain does not try to impersonate Makhmalbāf in any literal way, for he’s never actually seen or met him Instead Makhmalbāf

Contributor

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Contributor

October 2018

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet, writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and...

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’

Book Review

October 2018

Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Book Review

October 2018

Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story...

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Prize Entry

April 2017

/gosha rubchinskiy/

Christopher Burkham

Prize Entry

April 2017

1. APARTMENT INTERIOR/MORNING/BELYAYEVO, MOCKBA, ROSSIJSKAJA FEDERACIJA…   There is a T-shirt on the desk in front of him.  ...

feature

September 2012

Negation: A Response to Lars Iyer's 'Nude in Your Hot Tub'

Scott Esposito

feature

September 2012

I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do...

Prize Entry

April 2017

The Bad Thing

Annie Julia Wyman

Prize Entry

April 2017

1.   It must have been around the same time she decided that she really was using all the...

 

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