Consisting of titles and descriptions of works from antiquity to today that depict the Black female form, Robin Coste Lewis’s poem Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015) is, in its rolling invocations of unnamed slave girls and shards of looted statuary, both exhibition catalogue and litany of instrumentalisation. A reading of the poem, in a sanitised and objective voice, serves as the soundtrack to a walk through the Musée du Louvre in the French director Alice Diop’s short film Fragments for Venus (2025), which just showed at the New York Film Festival.
In the film, a museumgoer, a Black woman, strolls the galleries, looking at paintings from the collection. As she stares silently at, say, Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana (1562-63), Diop’s camera scours the canvas for traces of Blackness—a servant, a background figure—blowing them up to fill the frame, a close-up answered by a reverse-shot of the museumgoer in contemplation. This act of scepticism and retrieval—surely an art-historical response to Saidiya Hartman’s boundary-pushing scholarly work imagining the lives of enslaved people—is contrasted by the film’s second chapter, a series of moving-image portraits taken over a few sunny afternoons in the living museum of Black womanhood that is Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. A girl dribbles a basketball, a young woman reads, a crossing guard dances; in a coda, Diop races through a montage of work by, for and of Black woman, ending on Nona Faustine’s defiant They Tagged the Land with Trophies and Institutions from their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC (2013) and end credits scored to Meshell Ndegeocello’s spoken-word “Thus Sayeth the Lorde” (as in Audre).
The triumphant, defiantly inclusive tone makes the film a nice bit of PR for the fashion label Miu Miu, which commissioned it as part of its ongoing Women’s Tales series, but in orienting itself around archival material teeming with implications hardly exhausted by conventional scholarship, Fragments for Venus is in line with recent trends in Black montage inside and outside of the museum. Cinephiles will also draw connections with Diop’s other work. Her fiction debut Saint Omer, one of the key films of the decade, drew from the real transcripts from the trial of a Senegalese immigrant accused of drowning her child, but added the character of a courtroom observer, a Black filmmaker, rewiring the circuitry of the gaze—which is also what Diop does in Fragments of Venus—by considering the ways in which Black women look at each other.
A scene from Doomed and Famous (2025) Courtesy of Sequence Pictures
Another short film at the New York Film Festival likewise makes the act of looking at art its organising structural principle. Doomed and Famous (2025), directed by Bingham Bryant, follows Adrian Dannatt, a longtime New York correspondent for The Art Newspaper, around Miguel Abreu Gallery during the 2021 exhibition that gives the film its title, and was itself titled for his book, a collection of obituaries (some published in The Art Newspaper) of art world figures—the personalities who populate a scene, if not necessarily the geniuses who transcend it. The show featured objects from his collection, canvases and ephemera, collected and gifted, from the famous and the unfamous, from Pablo Picasso’s newspaper illustrations to a Nan Goldin photo to a Dick Smith shaped canvas which the artist personally hung in Dannatt’s loft.
Bryant suggestively juxtaposes the works on the wall with an audio track composed of philosophical readings voiced by Dannatt’s art-world associates, like the critic Dean Kissack and the No Wave filmmaker Eric Mitchell. The writings come from Tennyson and Debord, from the doomed and famous figures represented in the show and from Dannatt’s own obits and exhibition catalogue.
In a way different than in Diop’s film, the gallerygoer, with tweed coat, pocket square and quizzical look, is what holds together Doomed and Famous—he is the single sensibility that can unify this disparate collection of art and a journalistic career composed of piecework. Like in Marsden Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer (1914), we see the man through the things accumulated around him.
- Alice Diop’sFragments for Venus and Bingham Bryant’s Doomed and Famous were both featured in short film programmes at the New York Film Festival (until 13 October) at Lincoln Center
