To celebrate the upcoming release of Idris Elba’s directorial debut ‘Yardie’, which comes to cinemas on August 31, STUDIOCANAL is working in partnership with Autograph to launch a free photographic exhibition at Hackney Picturehouse.
This display features twenty-five works from Autograph’s archive, a unique collection of photographs addressing critical politics of race and representation. Autograph, established in London in 1988 to advocate the inclusion of historically marginalised photographic practices, is an arts charity based in Shoreditch, Hackney, with a mission to enable the public to explore questions of cultural identity, human rights and social justice through photography and film. The photographs – selected by Renée Mussai, Senior Curator and Mark Sealy, Director of Autograph – were produced by a diverse constituency of photographers from different cultural backgrounds who documented Britain’s Black communities in London during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Artists included in The Autograph Archive x ‘Yardie’ exhibition include Bandele ‘Tex’ Ajetunmobi Raphael Albert, Armet Francis, Colin Jones, Neil Kenlock, Dennis Morris, Charlie Philips, and Syd Shelton. Music journalist Lloyd Bradley will also be writing an introduction to the exhibition.
All works in the display are courtesy of Autograph, London, and supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Set in ’70s Kingston and ’80s Hackney, Yardie centres on the life of a young Jamaican man named D (Aml Ameen), who has never fully recovered from the murder, committed during his childhood, of his older brother Jerry Dread (Everaldo Creary). D grows up under the wing of a Kingston Don and music producer named King Fox (Sheldon Shepherd). Fox dispatches him to London, where he reconnects with his childhood sweetheart, Yvonne (Shantol Jackson), and his daughter who he’s not seen since she was a baby. He also hooks up with a soundclash crew, called High Noon. But before he can be convinced to abandon his life of crime and follow “the righteous path”, he encounters the man who shot his brother 10 years earlier, andembarks on a bloody, explosive quest for retribution – a quest which brings him into conflict with vicious London gangster Rico (Stephen Graham).
‘Yardie’ is the directorial debut of Idris Elba and stars Aml Ameen, Shantol Jackson, Everaldo Creary and Stephen Graham. Yardie will be in cinemas August 31.
Special nationwide preview screenings, including a live satellite Q&A with Idris Elba, take place on 23 August. See here for details. Find more information about Yardie on their official website.
