Crushed blacks are areas of photographic images where detail is lost through underexposure - a former printing flaw can yield desired potentials. As the theorist Tavia Nyongo asserts “If underexposed blacks on film are not simply devoid of content, but, to the contrary, filled with incommensurabilities, traces of a past life untranslatable into our own, might we not instead find ways of valuing those zones of indistinction for, and not in spite of, their mystery?” This series extends the potential of the crushed black, to both the soundscape and moving image. Constant yet ever in motion, Olu’s car becomes a space shared between driver and passenger, artist and interlocutor - its inhabitants and surroundings shifting registers between legibility and obscurity. Journeys become a space of conversation between that which is part-revealed; where shadows allow for complexity, intimacy and nuance to emerge, and yet, just as simply, fade away.




EPISODE ONE 

Olu Ogunnaike with Passengers BAFIC & Dan Marre

Directed and Edited by Olu Ogunnaike

Development Producers - Dan de Marre, Jos Bitelli and Sung Tieu

Producer - Louis Brown

DOP - Jonathan Bloom

Sound - Toby Burroughs

Commissioned by ELC as part of TV Dinners E03


At Tate Modern as part of the Nam June Paik major retrospective
As part of the Terra Foundation for American Art Series: New Perspectives