Using his trademark assemblage of esoteric costume and visual metaphors, Congolese-Belgian hitmaker and filmmaker Baloji explores the practice of skin lightening in black communities. Euphemistically described as ‘brightening’ or ‘toning’, skin bleaching takes many innocuous forms, such as creams, buffs and soaps to deal with hyperpigmentation, but is more often used by women to emulate Eurocentric beauty standards.

Blue Funk charts the physicality of being afraid. As chain reaction, fear settles over its targets, exposing their innate sentient responses of freeze, fight, fawn, and flight. The resulting cacophony evokes the volatility of this moment in time, a mounting pressure edging towards its breaking point.

Almost full moon in an arid mountain landscape. A young woman waters her flowering plants. The riverbed is dried out. She is at one with her silence. When sleep enfold her on the broken earth, she is transposed home.

When Sleep Enfolded Her offers a portrait of young woman looking for tenderness in a vaste environment. A deceptively simple, choreographed dance filmed in the heart of an oasis endangered by drought.