Memories of Migration with Andrew Jackson

Join us for a screening of three moving-image works, accompanied by an artist talk discussing these films alongside existing and forthcoming projects from Andrew Jackson's wider photographic and interdisciplinary practice. The programme comprises The Weight of Light (27 minutes), In Heart and Life and Longing, Part 2: Family Over Fame (20 minutes), and In Heart and Life and Longing, Part 3: Full Circle (19 minutes). 

Across photography and moving image, Jackson's work considers family, migration, Black diasporic experience, memory and the political histories embedded within landscapes and everyday life. These films emerge from a sustained interest in the relationship between Jamaica, Britain and Canada, and in the ways that identity is formed through movement, aspiration, intimacy, loss and inheritance.

Moving between Quebec, Ghana, Jamaica and the United Kingdom, The Weight of Light considers migration, racialisation and the traces of colonial violence that landscapes can reveal, conceal and carry. It asks how land becomes a repository for histories that may no longer be immediately visible, but which continue to shape how places are understood, inhabited and remembered. The two films in the In Heart and Life and Longing series focus more closely on family, masculinity and the emotional weight of migration. Rather than treating their subjects as illustrations of wider social questions, the films make room for speech, silence, humour and contradiction. They resist simple narratives of success, failure or belonging.

The accompanying artist talk would place the films in dialogue with Jackson's wider practice, including Little Burgundy, The Sentence Stays With Me, a Canada Council for the Arts-funded post-documentary project on the enduring effects of incarceration after release; The Ground Beneath Us: Black Cartographies of Montreal, which examines Black spatial experience across Montréal. Together, the screening and talk would offer audiences an opportunity to engage with the moving-image works in depth, while also considering the research, ethical questions and lived encounters that shape my approach to photography and film.

How can you participate? Join us in person by or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions or if we can make this event more accessible for you: Contact us at info.4@concordia.ca

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson is a British-Canadian photographer, moving-image artist and educator whose work examines memory, migration, family, Black presence and the histories carried by place. Working across photography, film, archival research, sound and writing, he explores personal experience in relation to wider social and political histories. His work is held in both private and permanent collections.