LADA Screens: Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson

Please join us for the screening of Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson’s The Gift as the final of four LADA Screens events centred around the themes of voice, care and healing.

Lateisha’s gentle yet fierce film explores the heart-felt intimacies and questions found within healing, belonging and personal growth. Following The Gift, Lateisha will screen the film plant portals: breath (2020) by multidisciplinary artist/filmmaker Nicky Chue (aka seedling library), which connects bumblebees, colonial trauma, alternate universes, and the concept of ‘rest’ in a meditation on the unspoken history many queer and trans people of colour carry, attempting to ask: Can nature heal us?

Lateisha will be joined by collaborators Kes Gill-Martin and Ava Riby-Williams for a discussion and interactive sonic/music offerings.

About The Gift 

The Gift (2022) is a single-take style short film, weaving together performance for camera, original sound composition and poetic storytelling that fuses speculative fiction and autobiography. We are invited into the artist’s home, to witness them playfully uncover (and reclaim) stories of grief, body, love, nature and home-making.

Processing the loss of their/her grandfather in 2021, this project became for Lateisha a container of care – a space-holding for their lived experiences of gender, race, class, survivorship, neurodivergence and illness/disability. The Gift invokes the wisdom of Blackness, queerness, ecology, as well as transfeminist futurism ways of being in the world. To stare back into the lens and declare Freedom. To declare what shall be protected – the generative act of Being Truly Seen.

The film was made as part of Lateisha’s participation in the exhibition An Ecology of Mind, seed-commissioned by Bethlem Gallery, that explored the relationships that connect art, ecology and health.

Following the screening, the film will be available to watch online until Saturday 25 May.