JIGNA
Leah Solomon and Qur'an Shaheed
- Price
- $12*
- Genre
- Film/Video
- Season
- Fall 2024
- DATE
- NOV 18
- TIME
- MON, 8 PM
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 50 minutes, with intermission
- COUNTRY
- USA
- PROGRAM
- Not yet available
* Discounts available for REDCAT members, students & the CalArts faculty and staff
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About
A four-chapter immersive film, Jigna joins dreams, spirits, and memories inspired by Les Guérillères by Monique Witting–a seminal feminist novel in which a lesbian society battles patriarchal order. The film reimagines and gives homage to Witting’s poetry through lucid soundscapes, myths, and movement. The experimental filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Leah Solomon uses abstraction, oral histories, and material ecologies to create new sonic and visual landscapes. The screening will be followed by a live musical performance by local pianist, poet, and singer Qur’an Shaheed, the culmination of an original collaborative project between Shaheed and Solomon commissioned for REDCAT.
The program includes a post-screening conversation with Leah Solomon and Qur’an Shaheed, moderated by film programmer Jheanelle Brown.
Please note: JIGNA contains strobe lights.
about the artists
Leah Solomon
Leah Solomon is a multidisciplinary artist and experimental filmmaker. She has exhibited work at Ars Electronica Festival and Centro Cultural Benjamín Carrión and screened films at NOW Gallery, Blackstar Film Festival, Berlin International Arts Film Festival, Trauma Bar und Kino, and Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts.
Qur’an Shaheed
Qur’an Shaheed (b. 1992, Pasadena, California) is a pianist, poet, singer, and songwriter based in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California. She has been playing piano since the age of 4, trained extensively in classical music through the expertise of her mother Sharon Shaheed and grandmother Monique Simpson. Since 2012, she has been developing her practice as a songwriter alongside her solo piano and ensemble work. She released the album Process, with producer Jesse Justice and Preference Records, in 2020 and regularly performs in and around Los Angeles. Her sound is innovative, highly personal, and experimental, incorporating elements of improvisation as well as neo-classical and neo-soul techniques. Shaheed has collaborated with Koreatown Oddity, filmmaker Vashni Korin, and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (of which her father Nolan Shaheed is also a member). She is the keyboardist for Jimetta Rose’s gospel choir The Voices of Creation. In 2020, she paired up with Chloe Scallion for Dublab x Femmebit’s The Art of Performance program, was interviewed by KCRW for the Private Playlist series, and featured in a special mixtape project by waltz for Gucci Shibuya Parco in Tokyo. Shaheed is also engaged in composing for moving image and film scoring, particularly drawn to projects that reflect on society, history, and unifying acts.
