For the 2024 Winter Season, Jupiter Artland is delighted to present Kialy Tihngang’s Neyinka and the Silver Gong (2024).

Kialy Tihngang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow, working across sculpture, video, textiles, animation and photomontage. Her work combines the dark humour of Nollywood with retrofuturism, satire and the visual language of advertisements aimed at mass Western audiences. Tihngang uses these tools to explore Blackness, queerness, Britishness, and the crushing structural oppressions that surround these personal themes.

The exhibition forms part of Jupiter ALL NEW Winter Series.

Tihngang’s work transforms the Steadings into a blue cave inspired in equal part by Narnian high-fantasy and Lil’ Kim’s blue fur look in the iconic Crush On You music video (1997). Historians and folklorists believe that references to fir gorma (‘blue men’) in ancient Irish chronicles refer to North African people enslaved by Vikings in the 9th Century, and brought to Ireland and the Scottish Hebrides. Neyinka and the Silver Gong weaves a speculative story around the fir gorma who might have escaped captivity, fled to a Scottish island and formed a clan.

The displaced fir gorma redefine African traditions in their new Scottish context: Sande secret society mask ceremonies and the Yoruba water deity Yemọja in mermaid form feature in the high melodrama of a Braveheart-infused Scottish landscape. The narrative interweaves practices of matriarchy, ancestor worship and queerness that were present in many precolonial African societies, but have been dissolved and demonised through colonial rule. The film challenges the supposed newness of the Black presence in Scotland and interrogates the formation of national identities.

Neyinka and the Silver Gong was made as part of ‘fir gorma’ a duo show with artist Josie KO, for Glasgow International Festival 2024. KO was in conversation with Tihngang, drawing on their contrasting and converging explorations into Black British histories and identities, producing a duo exhibition incorporating film and sculpture. ‘fir gorma’ (the research project) is an ongoing research project created by Josie KO in 2020.

The film is being exhibited concurrently at 87 Gallery, Hull, in Tihngang’s solo show Outwith. This dual showing reflects Tihngang’s interest in how displaced communities might construct identity and her own experience as a Black English woman living in Scotland.